CARIBBEAN ROUND-UP
Narcotics officer murdered in Guyana
GEORGETOWN, Guyana — A long-serving and efficient officer of Guyana’s Customs Anti-Narcotics Unit (CANU) was shot to death at his home, in front of his wife, late on Saturday night.
His murder brings to three, the number of law officers killed by armed bandits for the year.
Officer Harold Duncan, 50, was shot by two gunmen as he was entering his house at 145 Cato Drive, Agricola Village on the East Bank Demerara.
His death followed the killings of two police constables within 48 hours in the city last week and a subsequent drive-by shooting at the East Ruimveldt Police Outpost that led to the hospitalisation of four persons with gunshot wounds, one of them a rural constable.
According to police, Duncan’s assassins were apparently in hiding, awaiting his arrival home and struck when his wife opened the door and he was about to enter. As he fell, the gunmen pumped more bullets into his body before fleeing to the nearby home of another CANU officer where they fired off shots before disappearing.
The police are treating the murder and the spraying of bullets outside the home of the other CANU officer as a deliberate act of intimidation. One man was held for questioning by members of CANU who rushed to the scene of the tragedy.
Duncan is the second CANU officer to have been brutally cut down by armed bandits. On August 24 last year, Vibert Innis, deputy head of CANU, was gunned down in his car when he stopped to purchase newspapers at Buxton village on the East Coast of Georgetown.
With Duncan’s death, the total number of lawmen killed since April last year has increased to 17.
A plea for calypsonians
PORT OF SPAIN, Triniidad — A principal of the University of the West Indies is pleading for an end to the exploitation of the region’s calypsonians and for more appropriate awards for their contributions.
The plea came from Professor Bhoe Tewarie, head of the UWI’s St Augustine campus here, during a weekend speech at a National Action Cultural Committee ceremony to honour 20 calypsonians for their contributions in 2002.
It was the 15th such cultural award ceremony, and Tewarie noted: “Too many of our cultural icons have not received the recognition that is their due and, therefore, these awards serve a most important purpose.”
Instead of allowing the calypsonians and other performing artistes to be exploited, said the Tewarie, “we as a society must work with our artistes to ensure that they benefit in a tangible fashion from their creativity”.
Choosing Hoyte’s successor
GEORGETOWN, Guyana — Guyana’s main opposition People’s National Congress/Reform (PNCR) is organising a special delegates congress for February 1 to choose a successor to its late leader, Hugh Desmond Hoyte, who died from heart failure on December 22.
Party chairman and current interim leader, Robert Corbin, is expected to be endorsed as Hoyte’s successor since no other member of the major decision-making Central Committee has shown interest in contesting the post.
One of two candidates who had expressed an interest in challenging Hoyte for the presidency at the party’s biennial congress in August last year, vice-chairman Vincent Alexander, is now heading the committee preparing for next month’s special congress.
Corbin, who is in his early 50s, is a graduate of the Hugh Wooding Law School of the UWI. He said he was prepared to put on hold, his planned career as a lawyer in the interest of the party and to demonstrate how united the PNCR remains after the passing of Hoyte.
Once a new leader has been endorsed by the special congress, he would have to be elected by Parliament as the constitutional opposition leader. This could signal an end to the boycott of Parliament by the PNCR that has been in force since April last year.