LESS than a year after Barrackpore farmer Kamal Richard Mohammed and his brother began cultivating a parcel of land near their home, he was shot and killed by a bicycle-riding gunman on Tuesday.
Mohammed, 34, and a father of two, was fatally shot in the head during the ambush by the gunman while on the agricultural plot off Manohar Trace on Rochard Road.
A police report stated that around midday, the shooter rode up to Mohammed, pointed a firearm at him, and fired one shot in his direction, then escaped in a westerly direction along a dirt track. Police officers responded and with the assistance of relatives, Mohammed was placed in a vehicle to be taken for medical treatment.
Killed: Kamal Richard Mohammed
While en route along Papourie Road in Barrackpore, an Emergency Health Services ambulance rendered assistance and transported Mohammed to the San Fernando General Hospital. However, he was pronounced dead around 1.20 p.m.
Later that afternoon, police officers found a red and black mountain bike, fitting the description of the one used by the gunman, at the side of the roadway off Manohar Trace.
Mukesh Mahase, an employee of the Mohammed family, who was with Mohammed and one of his brothers, Rasheed, during the shooting, recalled the incident yesterday. He said he was tending to pumpkin plants when he heard three rounds of gunfire.
“I kneel on the ground with the pumpkin plants when I heard three shots. When I raise my head and watch on the road, I observe a man. I say, ‘Who is you?’ The man start to ride that bike real speed. The man had on long sleeve, and was on a mountain climber bike. His face was masked up,” he said.
“The brother (Rasheed) run coming from the land where the pond is, and bawl out. He say, ‘Look Rich now dead there by the pump.’ It was blood like that. I raised his head and put it on his brother’s knee. The next brother run with a towel and they start to make calls,” said the employee.
“We don’t trouble nobody, we don’t have nothing with nobody in the trace. Them is good soldiers. I know him as a little brother in front of me,” said Mahase. “They killed an innocent man.”
‘We don’t know how to tell his children’
At Mohammed’s home on Wednesday, his parents, Sackeer Mohammed, 73, and Leela Mohammed, 63, wept for their son, whom they said did not report any threats to them nor had there been previous incidents where he was attacked.
Leela said last year an elderly man from the community, who had previously been responsible for the lands, engaged the brothers to prepare and cultivate the plots. She said for several months they had been working hard to prepare the plots, and this year planted crops.
Leela said, “He did not deserve that (death). He did not trouble anybody. He would go to work and he loved to exercise and eat healthy. His children, aged four and six, have been asking for him, and we do not know how to tell his children that he died.”
Detectives of the Homicide Bureau of Investigations of Region Three are yet to uncover a motive for the killing.
