THE maternal grandmother of a minor is appealing to her captors to have the teenager returned home. Six days after her youngest granddaughter went missing, an emotional Reena Singh related that, having taken another granddaughter, who was with a child, to the New Amsterdam Hospital to be delivered on March 9 last,  she returned to her Mayda Farm  home, on the Corentyne Coast, to find  15-year- old Latisha Basil missing .
The woman related that she had travelled from Suriname with the two granddaughters, days earlier, so that the pregnant one would deliver her child in their homeland.
‘I returned from the hospital about 15:00hrs, and was calling for Latisha, but I got no answer. I asked around, including my neighbour [Dolly Seelall], who said she don’t have time. I walked around the village making enquiries but got no useful response’.
The middle-aged woman, the sole breadwinner for her household, since her daughter was diagnosed with a heart condition, said following an unsuccessful search in the village, she returned home where her 13-year-old grandson, Narvin, came home from school , and on learning that his sister was missing , said, “Mammy , I see Aunty Dolly  and she son hugging Latisha under the house’.
The grandparent said she went to the Whim Police Station, where she was informed that there were no police ranks available.
She telephoned her husband who was in Suriname, and he travelled immediately to their Corentyne home where he joined in the search.
The grieved woman said that the teen, a former Bush Lot Secondary School student, was at Tuschen West Demerara.
“We walked all over with pictures of Latisha , and car drivers in the area said they saw her at one instance standing at the road corner, crying’.
‘I am pleading with her captors to bring her back home, as she is a good girl. I do not want my granddaughter to be taken to the hinterlands to be sexually exploited. I need her at home’.
Singh said she is of the opinion that her abductor is known to have taken minors into the hinterland to exploit them.
A male relative, who had accompanied the woman to New Amsterdam where she met with the media, related that on Tuesday night, he received a telephone call from the relatives of the alleged abductor who requested that   the family of the missing girl prepare a document stating that the teen’s family will not have the matter taken up with the police when the minor is returned home.
According to him, the caller promised to seek the intervention of a lawyer to have a similar document drafted.
He said having enquired about the safety of the child, he received another telephone call from a male whose voice he recognized, telling the missing girl to say she was all right. But all he heard was a child crying.