Several armed bandits were caught at a road block at the Demerara Harbour Bridge after robbing a gas station on the West Bank Demerara late Friday night.
Eyewitnesses said five men were arrested and taken to La Grange Police Station hours after raiding the On the Go Gas Station and its staff of cash and ice-creams.
Three of the robbers had joined a bus headed to Georgetown but were arrested after police at a road block
decided to search the vehicle. The police said they recovered two cell phones which were stolen from workers at the gas station.
The other two men were arrested at different locations subsequent to police investigations. One of the men was arrested at his home in Hunter Street, Albouystown.
The robbery occurred around 10:30 pm while two of the gas station employees were watching wrestling on television.
Devon Granville said that he was immersed in the show when the men walked in and yelled at them to brace the wall or they would be shot. “When I peep under my right arm I see one of them with a gun and another one with a knife,” the man told Stabroek News. He added that six people were in the gas station when the bandits showed up.
According to the police, the robbers were armed with a handgun, icepicks and knives. Granville recalled the men instructing him and the others to lie on the ground while taking one of the pump attendants to the cashing machine. “All of us lie down on the ground but there was one man who didn’t want to listen and the men beat him up bad and then tell the pump attendant to pass all the money.
When he gave them the money they keep saying that that wasn’t all the money,” he said, recalling the men becoming angry and threatening to burn him. The bandits poured gasoline on the man. “I was feeling really scared because I didn’t expect something like that to happen at that time,” Granville said.
He added that the men took the cash and started to fuss about the security cameras, saying they would burn up everyone in the place if they did not show them where the cameras were. He stated that the men then escaped in a car.
“I flag another car but the man get frighten after I told him what happen but we head down the bridge and there was a road block and we tell the police everything that happened and we returned to the gas station,” he said, adding that the owner of the fuel station, Stephen Persaud, decided to patrol the West Demerara Public Road and subsequently they identified two of the men standing at the junction of the Vreed-en-Hoop Stelling.
“We saw them and then one of them run into Plastic City and then we found the car not too far from there and the police hold the driver.”
He noted that the police called them and related that three of the men were caught at a road block at the bridge.
The driver of the car, he said, led the police to one of the men living in Albouystown.
Amir Khan, a pump attendant at the gas station, said he was traumatised by the attack after the men soaked him with gasoline and threatened to set him on fire.
Persaud, the owner of the gas station, said he was relieved that the men were caught. “They raid the place and took all the money and people cellphones. They even took the ice-creams in the fridge,” he said.
Meanwhile, police also reported that they were able to apprehend two men who hijacked a taxi at the New Road, Vreed-en-Hoop around 3.45 pm on Friday.
According to a police press release, a taxi driver, Narine Bahadur, of Canal Number Two, West Bank Demerara, was attacked and robbed of his motor vehicle by the men who hired him to travel from Vreed-en-Hoop to Parika.
The release said that the police responded to the report and recovered the vehicle at a location in Vreed-en-Hoop, while further investigations led to the arrest of the men in a restaurant at Harlem, West Coast Demerara. An unlicensed .38 Taurus revolver was also recovered.
The men are in police custody assisting with the investigation.
