A man caught and charged for the theft of GTT’s fiber optic cable last month was on Friday made to answer for the offense when he appeared at the Georgetown Magistrates’ Courts.
Ricky Singh, 22, of Lot “F” Grove, East Bank Demerara (EBD) appeared before Magistrate Annette Singh and denied being the vandal.
The charge against him alleged that he between July 22 and 24 2017, at Soedyke, Linden he vandalised and stole a fiber optic cable belonging to the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Company (GTT).
Singh pleaded not guilty to the charge and was granted bail in the sum of $350,000. He is expected to return to Court on August 25, 2017.
During the month of July, criminally minded persons had launched an attack on the company, sabotaging its cables over ten times within the month.
As a result of the vandalism, Linden, Ituni, Kwakwani, Mabura, Mahadia, Troy Mining and Bartica communities were affected.
Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of GTT, Justin Nedd dubbed the attacks a destruction of GTT’s communication infrastructure by persons who had clear motives. He even called on the Guyanese populace to lend their assistance in aiding the capture of the person/s involved, offering a $10M reward for same.
“This is being done by people who know what they are doing. This is an attack of the people of Guyana and I want to say that this is an attack of 22,000 households that we will bring 50 megabits per second internet speed to in 2017” said Nedd.
Telecommunication’s Minister, Cathy Hughes had also called the situation sad and disclosed that the perpetrators when found will face the full brunt of the law.
On July 24, GTT workers discovered that the company’s Blaze fibre optic cable at one location was sabotaged just one day before it was launched and in February, similar acts of vandalism were carried out when the company had just launched its high speed LTE broadband in Essequibo.
The company’s estimated losses amounted to some $50M.
