Dad shot as robbers hit Sando home

Six-year-old Diana Maharaj sat on a couch crying as bandits robbed her 15-year-old brother after shooting their father at their San Fernando home around noon yesterday. Neither Diana nor her brother Daren Maharaj were hurt but their father, Lalman, is nursing a wound to the left thigh at San Fernando General Hospital. The three assailants escaped with a quantity of jewelry. It was the third time—the second in two months—that the family was robbed. Daren Maharaj, a Form Three student at Pleasantville Secondary, said his father was helping him fix a music system attached to his bicycle in their yard at Cipero Road, Victoria Village.

Diana, his brother Andre, 11, and grandmother Kuntie, 68, were inside the house.  Maharaj said when he saw the three men, one of whom was wearing a hood, on the road he thought they looked suspicious and drew it to his father’s attention. “I just see them running towards me from across the road and one of them pull out a gun…Next thing I just hear a loud explosion and my father fall to the ground and bawl out,” he said. He added that two of them began “roughing” him up and carried him inside. He said they called his grandmother and began demanding “all the money and gold.”  He said his brother was not around but his sister sat on a couch crying. He said they stole his gold chain, ring and watch and his father’s chain from on the shelf.

He said they ran off when they saw a man approaching the house. Maharaj said he was not scared and was thinking about ways to fight them off.  However, his grandmother and other occupants of the house said they were very frightened. They said around Christmas last year, they were also robbed, and about five years before that. San Fernando police are investigating.