Still no word on missing MFK Trading boss
Three days have passed since Guyana’s two leading daily newspapers carried front page articles on missing
businessman Mohamed F. Khan and still there is no word on his whereabouts.
The businessman’s relatives had also placed an advertisement, calling on anyone who knows his whereabouts to contact them or the nearest police station, but to date they remain clueless about his fate.
The businessman, who has been residing in neighbouring Venezuela for the past few years after closing down his popular establishment on Hadfield Street, Georgetown, was last heard from on August 21.
A missing person report was first made to the Guyana Embassy in Venezuela by Khan’s Venezuelan wife who last saw him on that date when he left the Spanish-speaking country for Guyana to contact his attorneys who were handling some business arrangements for him.
Prior to that, Khan, 54, was the subject of an alleged execution attempt when he was shot in his abdomen by a lone gunman at La Grange, West Bank of Demerara on July 9, last, while he was on a brief visit to Guyana.
Speculation has begun to creep in, with family members making moves to identify the skeletal remains of a man of Indian descent that was found a few weeks ago.
“They went to identify it, but the people at the parlour told them that they had to get a police,” a source close to the businessman told this newspaper yesterday.
Their suspicions stem from the fact that they were told by a mortuary attendant during an earlier visit that the skull of the remains that were found had a muff of Indian hair.
A police source, who was on hand at the scene where the remains were found, told this newspaper that it would be difficult for any positive identification to be made with the naked eye given the state of the remains.
“There are no dentures for anybody to look at. The only thing that we could solve this with is DNA,” the source said.
Kaieteur News understands that the missing businessman’s relatives who reside overseas are contemplating travelling to Guyana soon with the hope of getting answers about Khan’s disappearance.
“He came over here to meet his lawyer and to check on some business stuff. Since then nobody can get in contact with him. Everybody was trying to contact him and call all his friends and people he would go by, but nobody seems to know anything,” a close relative lamented.
“The thing is, he has a wife in Venezuela and three small kids. He was supposed to come to Guyana and then return to Venezuela in five days, so when his wife did not see him, she tried contacting everyone she knows that can trace his whereabouts. People he normally deals with said they saw him months ago.”
During an interview with this newspaper following the July execution attempt on his life, Khan had implicated a former business associate who had threatened him over a soured property deal. Khan had also disclosed that he believed the gunman was either a serving or former member of the Guyana Police Force, giving rise to his suspicions that his business associate is using his well-placed “connections” to escape justice.
During the interview Khan had related that his bout of troubles stemmed from the sale of one of the many properties he owned in the city. He said the buyer was trying to rob him of several million dollars owed to him from the sale of a prominent city business.
“I keep asking him for my money and at first he was always making excuses and then he started threatening me. He threatened me that if I come back to Guyana he will take me out,” he had stated.
Khan, who was a staunch advocate of the Buy Local campaign, said that he learnt from his underworld connections that there was an $11M bounty on his head.
Khan, a former television talk show host on the popular CNS Channel 6, had been out of Guyana for the past six years, claiming that he fled the land of his birth because of death threats he had been receiving. He is no stranger to controversy, having had major differences with a former top government official, which he claimed forced him to sell his business and flee Guyana.