Kidnapped T&T couple murdered

PORT-OF-SPAIN — The worst fears of the family members of the Trinidadian businessman and his wife who were kidnapped on Sunday night were realised when their severely brutalised, decomposing bodies were found in an isolated canefield yesterday.

The 64 year-old businessman, Mahase Rampersad, and his 62 year-old wife, Darlin, were abducted in the driveway of their Palmsite home in San Fernando shortly after returning from a birthday party for their daughter.

It was the 10th armed kidnapping case for the year. But the killing of the Rampersads was the first time that abducted victims were murdered and without a ransom being demanded as had been the pattern in other incidents, mostly involving business people.

As shocked, grief-stricken family members were yesterday preparing funeral arrangements for the murdered husband and wife, the police confirmed reports that the Rampersads had been blindfolded and beaten to death with their heads bashed in.

Their hands were tied with pieces of cloth and twine and they were dressed in the clothes they were wearing when they left their home on Sunday to attend their daughter’s birthday party.

The police, who had used tracker dogs, speedboats and a helicopter in their hunt for the kidnapped victims and their abductors, said that from the state of the bodies, it would seem that they had been killed within hours after being taken hostage on Sunday night.

The gruesome discovery was made yesterday by relatives who were engaged in their own frantic search, drawn to the death scene by a foul odour.

Some 50 police officers rushed to the scene where distraught family members were hysterically weeping.

Murder, kidnap in Montserrat

PLYMOUTH — The St Lucia-born owner of the Carib World Travel Agency in Montserrat, Simeon Sealy, was murdered in his office yesterday by a former employee who was being hunted by the police.

In what is said to be the first murder in many years in this volcanic island of the Leeward chain, Sealy was shot at point blank range by his attacker, who then kidnapped at gunpoint a Jamaican female employee, Camille Grey (21) and escaped in the car owned by his murdered victim.

The man wanted for questioning is Steve Mollyneaux, who was deported for crimes committed in the USA. He had recently been released from the island’s prison. The police are probing reports that Sealy’s murder may be connected to a dispute with his former employee.

The kidnapped employee, Grey, was found later, unhurt and, Sealy’s car was found abandoned.

Sealy was the husband of Monserrat member of parliament Rosyln Cassel-Sealy.

Shooting, arson by Guyanese gunmen

GEORGETOWN — Gunmen torched two dwelling houses and wounded two members of a family in the troubled Buxton-Friendship community on Guyana’s East Coast Demerara where armed criminals have been terrorising residents in recent months.

Nine residents of the two houses, among them a 63 year-old granny, managed to escape the rapid gunfire as the wooden buildings were being destroyed before units of the fire service arrived to put out the blaze. Security forces arrested five men on the scene.

The houses belonged to the Chester family who have been receiving threats for allegedly providing information to the police about suspected gun-runners and criminal elements of the area.

Wounded by gunshots during the arson and shooting incidents yesterday were Devon Chester, 28, and Malika Mingo, 16.

When a Guyana Defence Force patrol arrived on the scene, they were fired on by the arsonists. The soldiers retaliated but no one was injured.

Granny Edris Chester, who owned the destroyed houses and lived in one with her son, Devon and grandsons, had to throw one of her grandchildren through the window as she made her escape from her modest home of many years.

Lawless elements on the rampage in East Coast villages and especially in the Buxton-Friendship area, over recent months, attacking villagers and destroying property, including damage to a main railway embankment road, have also been selectively harassing families they suspect of cooperating with the police and army.