Those who had previously given encouragement to these brutish armed bandits by their own silence, or worse, collaborated in offering them sanctuaries and simply refused to help the law enforcing agencies, should hang their heads in shame.

In all of this, Buxton's once proud place in the post-slavery history of this country, is being systematically undermined by criminals while a party with some political influence in that village engages in meaningless public statements without doing anything practical to help the law-abiding and decent people who face problems common to other villagers.

Edris Chester, a retired public servant, was shockingly uprooted from her native Buxton when gunmen attacked her home, set it ablaze forcing her to throw her grandson through a window and jump behind him. She was to experience more horrors as the bandits shot and killed her pigs and horses in an apparent plan to literally wipe out the family.

The Chester family had to be placed in a safe house to protect their lives. All because, it seems, the callous, reckless, hate-driven criminals, with no respect for law and order or plain human decency, felt that the Chester household had cooperated with the Police -- as citizens across this country are expected to do -- in the fight against criminality.

FROM CHESTER TO RASHEID
Then came last week's rein of terror in the village of Non Pariel where about a dozen criminals launched a most vicious attack on some six households, beating and robbing.

Worse, dousing a 56-year paralysed widower, Haroon Rasheid, with kerosene and setting him ablaze while others of their depraved criminal gang indulged themselves in raping two young women.

These are no ordinary criminals. Such cowardly, beastly behaviour is an affront to all decent, law-abiding people of this land.

After the infamy against the Chester family, they turned to degrading two young women in Non Pariel and making a human torch of a man grieving over the loss of his wife who died in an accident while his comforters at a wake were being beaten and robbed.

In critical condition at the Georgetown Hospital, Rasheid was reported to have lost sight in both eyes.

Bizarre, mind-boggling, indeed! And it is high time that the Police and the Army come up with more practical results in curbing the criminal onslaught that has so tarnished the image of Guyana and further aggravates its hopes for social and economic progress.

MURDERING OF COPS
Between the outrageous attacks by criminals on the Chester family at Buxton and their abominable deeds at Non Pariel of raping, setting the grieving widower Rasheid alight, robberies and beatings, two law enforcment officers were brutally executed in planned hits, both at Buxton.

First, there was the execution of the deputy head of the Customs Anti-Narcotics Unit (CANU), Vibert Inniss, murdered when he stopped there to buy newspapers from a vendor, as was his custom. Then came the murder of the young Feroze Bashir.

Some 10 law enforcement officers have already been killed by the criminals for the first eight months of 2002. This is said to be unprecedented in the 162-year history of the Guyana Police force.

Incidentally, it would not have gone unnoticed by the public that the funeral for Andrew Douglas, one of the most wanted criminals and one of five fugitives from justice, also took place at Buxton.