Saturday, 12 January 2008

Do you want to be randomly selected to become a drug mule by having cocaine slipped into your suitcase


13:17 |


Is it safe to visit Guyana when on leaving you run the risk of being randomly selected to become a drug mule by having cocaine slipped into your suitcase at the airport? There have been at least three known instances of this occurring over the past year or so and a couple a few years earlier. Quite possibly, knowing the tenacity of drug smugglers, there have been others, which managed to escape the notice of the authorities.
Some years ago, after the first couple of incidents, one airline began ensuring security by plastic-wrapping travellers' luggage. The others have been slow to follow suit and the government has not seen it fit to date to acquire and operate the necessary equipment, which could be a revenue earner as in other countries a fee is charged for this service.
Is it safe when you could again randomly be targeted at the airport to be robbed, trailed to your home or hotel or an appropriately lonely stretch of road and be set upon by gun-toting bandits? This has happened countless times over the years. That there has not been such an incident in the very recent past is not because of any action by law enforcement authorities. Rather, it's because travellers have become much more alert and employ subterfuges to confuse any would-be ambusher.
Is it safe, when like the Chinese team whose expertise built the Skeldon diesel plant or the Cuban doctors who contribute in the public health care system you could be attacked and robbed by thieves with little or no redress by the authorities?
Could it possibly be safe when you might be at a public place, which turns out to be the wrong place at the wrong time? Tuesday night's shooting near Bonny's Supermarket might have been an isolated incident, but it raises the scary 'what if' question. Any of a number of foreigners resident here or visiting might have been at the supermarket that evening and could very well have been injured or killed, not because they were deliberately targeted, simply because they happened to be there.
As it is, two local men were injured - apart from the targeted individual who was killed - and several other people traumatised. Perish the thought, but there could even have been children in the supermarket at the time. In Wednesday morning's incident, where bandits targeted a Moleson Creek-bound minibus and killed its driver in an apparent attempt to rob its passengers, a small child was reportedly involved.


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