A 76-year-old Toco businessman and his most trusted employee were chopped to death at their Cumana home yesterday. It was a daybreak attack believed to have been motivated by robbery.

Dead are businessman Sookdeo Manohar known affectionately in the area as ’Billin’ and his 56-year-old employee Sonny Valentine better known as ’Chief’.

A neighbour was in police custody up to last night, assisting homicide detectives with their investigations into the killings.

The double murder took place around 5.30 a.m. yesterday.

Manohar was the sole transporter of cooking gas in the village and the area’s biggest money lender. He also cashed pension cheques for the area’s aged.

Manohar always made bank deposits on Monday, a neighbour said. Month-end Mondays were his biggest pay day.

Valentine worked for Manohar for the past nine years and also lived in a room downstairs his boss’s two-storey home.

That house at the corner of the Toco Main Road and Gajadhar Trace in Cumana is where the cutlass attack took place yesterday.

Valentine was killed inside the house.

Manohar died on the roadway while on his way to get help from a police sergeant who lived across the road.

Manohar’s body lay face up on the road, footsteps away from the home of Sgt Francis Pierre of the Matelot Police Station.

Both Manohar and Valentine sustained chop wounds to their heads, Senior Superintendent of the Eastern Division, Margaret Sampson-Brown said at the crime scene yesterday.

There were no signs of forced entry into the house, Sampson-Brown said.

’The evidence was very overpowering...the killing of these two men is very worrisome...but this murder will be solved,’ Sampson-Brown said yesterday.

After the fatal choppings, the attacker is said to have ran along the Toco Main Road and sought refuge at the home of a family member.

This family member was the one who handed the suspect, aged in his 20s, over to homicide detectives.

Manohar’s 40-year-old son Deonath said he was traumatised by his father’s killing. Manohar had ten children, but lived upstairs the Cumana house by himself.

Manohar never stayed out later than 6 p.m. and his entire house was heavily burglar-proofed.

The killings resulted in calls of concern from several residents in the Cumana area.

Sampson-Brown empathised with the residents but assured that ’police officers are relentlessly working to protect everyone in the area’

Investigations are continuing.