THE police have arrested an East Canje man after he burned his rented residence to the ground on Tuesday night, leaving some $3M in damage.

The man, identified as Davendra Samru, 29, was allegedly intoxicated at the time and was arguing with his wife from whom he recently separated, when he threatened to burn the house down in the presence of police officers. Samru is a taxi driver by occupation.

According to neighbours at around 22:00hrs, the man made good on his promise, lit a white cloth and set the two-storey wooden and concrete building on fire.

He then calmly left.

The Guyana Chronicle understands that Samru and his now ex-wife have been renting the Lot 35 Raghubir Street, Reliance Abandon house for the past two years. The couple separated, but the woman continued to occupy the house while the suspect lived at East Canje.

Eyewitnesses recalled that Samru arrived at the property in a drunken state and began hurling expletives and calling out his ex-wife. After not getting an answer since the woman was not at home, he used a cutlass to break the locks. He then entered the house and damaged several items.

Neighbours notified the woman who arrived shortly with two uniformed officers to confront Samru and get him to leave, but he threatened to chop anyone who dared enter the yard.

“He come out from the veranda and start cuss up say he guh kill everybody. He go inside and come out back with a laptop and say ‘you a laptop? You name lap top eh?’ And pitch it to the ground and it bruck up. He come back out with a glass table and fling it outside and it buss up to pieces and start go on bad that he gun burn down the house,” a neighbour related.

The laptop, this publication understands, belonged to the child of his ex-wife who recently sat the NGSA examinations. The two police officers reportedly then left to get back-up.

After the police left, the man came out of the house, lit a white cloth and went back inside.

“He start dance and sing fire, fire, then next thing the fire get big and he start walk out,” the neighbour recalled.

The man walked into the arms of the police who arrived in a patrol vehicle, but by that time the fire had become intense and was raging uncontrollably, thereby preventing residents from saving anything from the house.

By the time the fire service arrived, the damage was already done and the house was reduced to rubble. The firefighters had to concentrate their efforts on containing the blaze from spreading to nearby houses.

Residents noted that were the man not armed with the cutlass, they may have been able to apprehend him or even extinguish the blaze.