THE main suspect in the murder of hotelier Joseph Jagdeo, who had been a guest, is in police custody awaiting an identification parade to be attended by hotel staffers.

The widow of the deceased, Fazia Hack told the Guyana Chronicle that an employee of her husband’s South Central Hotel and Bar, on South Road, Georgetown, telephoned her with the information yesterday morning.
Hack, herself, disclosed that her dead husband will be cremated today at Good Hope Crematorium, East Coast Demerara, following a funeral service at Brickdam Cathedral, also in the city.
She said, however, that the business will remain closed, indefinitely, until she decides what will happen to the hotel that has been in existence for more than 20 years.
Jagdeo, 62, of Lot 218 South Road, whose trussed up body was found under a bed in the hotel last Thursday morning, was allegedly, murdered over the theft of two of his cell phones.
He had been in an altercation after he expressed his displeasure during a confrontation with the suspect, who was staying there.
Hack informed that she was told two cell phones belonging to her husband were recently stolen by a male guest, who was scheduled to vacate the hotel last Wednesday.
She said her husband got wind of the identity of the perpetrator and confronted the man, who had been invited to the hotel, last week Sunday, by a known female who frequents the place.

Last seen
Jagdeo was last seen early Wednesday morning in his office, as usual tending to paper work and after that his movements were unaccounted for until his corpse was discovered under a bed in room ten.
His hands were tied, his mouth was stuffed with a pillow case and blood was oozing from his nose.
Hack, a mother of one, divulged, to this publication, that her husband had abandoned his house in Bel Air Park and lived in an apartment in the hotel, so he could manage the business effectively.
She lives with her teenage son in Alexander Village, another part of the city, but would visit South Central Hotel and Bar almost on a daily basis since they were a close couple and, when she was last there, the Tuesday before yesterday, nothing regarding her husband was different.
The woman learnt, subsequently, about the theft of her husband’s cell phones and what happened after from hotel employees, who revealed that the police detained a man who said he bought one of the cell phones from a third man.
It is believed that the killer concealed himself in the building and left after he murdered Jagdeo since no one recalled seeing the latter on Wednesday morning.
A female employee discovered Jagdeo’s body in a room of the three-storey hotel which employs about 15 persons, mostly women.
Jagdeo, after remigrating to Guyana 31 years ago, took over the family business and invested his time and money and, during that time, he was described as a very generous person.
Police reported that a post mortem, performed on Jagdeo’s body, by Government Pathologist Dr. Nehaul Singh, determined the cause of death to be asphyxia due to manual strangulation.