PAGE 12
Kaieteur News
Wednesday July 12, 2017
‘Bartica, Lusignan massacre killer saved my life’ - HOSTAGE REVEALS
- “He even allowed me to keep my wedding ring” By Romila Boodram
WANTED: Ex-cop Uree Varswyck
WANTED: Stafrei Hopkinson Alexander
WANTED: Mark Royden Williams
With swollen feet and bruises about his body, 22year-old Mathew Shivtahal, who was held hostage by four high-profile prisoners on Sunday, recalled how he begged Bartica massacre suspect, Mark Royden Williams, to spare his life so that he could see his one-yearold son again. “I say ‘Rasta, I got a oneyear-old son, and I don’t want him to grow up without a father’ and he (Williams) said just because I tell him that, he will allow me to go,” Shivtahal recounted yesterday during an interview with this newspaper. As much as the young man was scared of being with the four criminals, he tried his best to maintain his composure and even addressed the men as “Soulj” and “Soulja Man” as he pleaded with them to free him. After seven hours of trekking through thick bushes and swimming across trenches with the escapees, who assisted him over the water, Shivtahal was allegedly given direction and was informed to run without looking back if he wanted to remain alive. It was the Bartica massacre killer who allowed the young man to leave and go to be with his son. Shivtahal was freed when the men were at the sevendoor sluice in the backlands
Matthew Shivtahal at Land of Canaan, East Bank Demerara (EBD). He was trekking through the bushes with Stafrei Hopkinson Alexander, ex-cop Uree Varswyck, Williams and an Amerindian man yet to be identified. HOW IT ALL STARTED Shivtahal said he was planning to have a quiet Sunday evening with his wife, Rohanie Shivtahal and son at the Kitty seawall when a woman he had dropped off at Industry, East Coast Demerara, earlier in the day, called and asked that he return
for her. The young man left home at Kaneville, Grove, East Bank Demerara, telling his wife that he would be back to take them to the seawall. After picking up the passengers and while on his way back to the East Bank, as fate would have it, he decided to drive through the city, since he thought it might have been too congested on Mandela Avenue. “I come down Camp Street and I hear two gunshots and the police vehicle come and Continued on page 29