TAKING his cue from opposition media’s Gordon Moseley’s broadcast message, which made a comparison between the police response to protests in Albion in 2001 and Linden in 2012, Region 10 Chairman Sharma Solomon sought to convey the impression that the police only shoots at African-Guyanese protesters. Solomon explicitly mentioned protests at Albion when sugar workers and other residents protested depredations against them by bandits while the police stood idly by.
The residents’ nerves were stretched to breaking point after being forced to ‘keep watch’ all night. Many felt that the police were complicit with the bandits, because night after night one resident or another was attacked by armed bandits while the police either never responded to calls for help, or they responded long after, and their investigations never produced results.
When the residents could get no redress from anywhere they staged a protest and police fired live rounds at them, killing Mohamed Shamshuddin, who was not part of the protest and was riding peacefully along the roadway, and injuring several protesters and non-protesters going along their lawful business, which Moseley and other rabble rousers, who continue to stir up racial strife in the country continue to ignore.
The killing of the innocent passerby Shamshuddin, happened during the period of Ramadhan, when he was observing fast, and was returning home after he had just offered prayers at the Masjid.
But Solomon and Moseley are just part of the opposition cabal that has been silencing the facts of the Albion protests, which were not staged to rob the country of revenues, and to live free off the sweat of their fellow citizens, but to create awareness of their plight of lack of protection against armed bandits who were terrorizing and attacking them relentlessly, with many victims being either injured or killed during robbery sprees.
The opposition has been propagandizing a legitimate protest by citizens of an Indian dominant community to create racial hostilities in the country. David Granger especially has been peddling this lie for years.
But it is apposite to ask at this time of universal acceptance of commission of inquiries into police shootings as to why there was never any inquiry into the death of the Albion canecutter, Mohammed Shamshudeen, not even by new-found messiah of sugar workers, Ramjattan, Nagamootoo, Freddie Kissoon, Nigel Hughes, Gerhard Ramsaroop, and the bush doctor Ramayya.