Eleven more persons, including a Guyana Defence Force (GDF) private, were held yesterday as the police continued a cross-country sweep to recover several million dollars reported stolen from an armoured Securicor van on Thursday.
The money was being transported from the New Amsterdam, Berbice branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia on Thursday morning, but the driver of the vehicle and his two security colleagues later told the police that they had been waylaid at Mahaica by nine heavily armed bandits who stole the money.
The police have since detained them as investigators said they had difficulty believing their story.
“Based on the information flowing from these three suspects, we were able to recover some of the money - in excess of $12M which is nearly half,” a senior police source told Stabroek News yesterday.
The operation involved searching several houses, as a consequence of which 11 persons were detained, bringing the total number of persons in police custody to 14. A senior GDF source told this newspaper yesterday that the army is aware of “an allegation being made against a rank who has been Absent Without Leave (AWOL) and who is a relative of someone in the employ of Securicor.”
Up to press time, the police source told Stabroek News, the police were conducting searches at a West Coast Demerara location in an effort to retrieve the weapons that were in the possession of the guards during the alleged robbery.
At the time of the alleged incident, all three of the guards were armed - one with a shotgun and two each with a pistol. The men had told the police that two men, dressed in police traffic clothes, had signalled to them to stop while they were heading to the city along the Mahaica Public Road.
They claimed that after the driver had stopped the armoured van, seven men with “big” guns emerged from the bushes, stripped them of their weapons, a cellular phone, a hand-held radio set and two wristwatches, and had commanded the driver to proceed to a deserted spot from where they made off with the money.
From the inception, investigators said they had doubts about the guards’ story. Bank officials, as well as Securicor, have remained mum on the issue.