Headline

Belize Ports Limited (BPL) chief executive Luke Espat gave interviews to both Channel 5’s Stewart Krohn and Channel 7’s Jules Vasquez this evening. Lucas was responding to a Godfrey Smith column in the issue of THE BELIZE TIMES published earlier today, a column which blew the whistle on a problem between BPL and the cruise shipping giant, Carnival, a problem which the Hon. Minister of Tourism (the said Smith) described as a “schism” which “appears to be irreconcilable.”

Jodie Myvett, 23, a receptionist/secretary at the Central Bank of Belize, is lucky to be alive tonight after being shot at by her boyfriend, Mark Medina, 22.

The last screams of Keisha Sutherland, 28, a badly abused woman, rang out from her home on Wednesday morning at the corner of Bocotora and Racoon Streets. She lay in a pool of her blood, fatally wounded after having been maniacally stabbed 20 times by the father of two of her four children - one two years old and the other just eleven months old.

Businessman Arun Hotchandani this morning moved to evict the Belize City Council from its Pound Yard location. Reports to Amandala are that at about 10:00 this morning four of Hotchandani’s workmen began dismantling a wooden shack that was being used as the carpentry shed. The Council knew that they were coming, and the materials from the shed were removed yesterday

Tonight, the Perez Family of South End Corozal is homeless after a tow-head truck, driven at the time by Elvin Conorquie, 32, and a Mitsubishi pick-up truck, driven at the time by, Hilario Alcoser, 45, collided with each other.

William “Cat” Usher, 30, a resident of Wagner’s Lane, around 9:00 p.m. last night was ambushed and gunned down in front of his common-law wife, 23-year-old Audra Andrews, who is presently five months pregnant with his second child. Usher was shot 19 times. Relatives we spoke with tonight said he was shot in the face and upper body area.

A look of disbelief appeared today on the face of David McKoy, Jr., 31, the son of former PUP Minister, the late David McKoy, Sr., when a jury of 5 men and 3 women found him guilty of attempted rape. (The late Mr. McKoy, Sr. won the Stann Creek Rural constituency in seven consecutive general elections – from 1957 to 1984.)

In May of this year Ricardo “Ricky” Aguilar, Taedron Bennett, and Joseph Kee - all from the north side - were charged for the sensational Mother’s Day double murder of brothers Phillip and Kevin Brannon from the Yabra area of Southside.

A 14-year-old Standard 6 student is dead tonight, his body in the morgue at the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital (KHMH) after he was shot to death yesterday evening sometime around 6:10 while playing in a yard on Banak Street. As many as 25 shots shattered the silence, and today police collected 24 expended shells from the area. Mortally wounded at the end of the shooting was Queen’s Square Anglican student Randy Conorquie, 14, shot seven times in the body.

This morning two children - a little girl, 2, and a little boy, 4, were the only witnesses to a stabbing incident in which their father, 28, savagely stabbed their mother, 22, in the palm of her hand when she placed her hand over her stomach, which, it seemed, was the intended target for the knife. He then turned the knife on himself. The man, whose name police have not revealed because he has not been formally charged, stabbed himself in the stomach. The knife was stuck there until doctors removed it at the Northern Regional Hospital (NRH).