Family still wait, pray for missing Vijay

WHILE most families celebrated the arrival of the New Year yesterday with toasts, fireworks,  hugs and merriment, the family of abducted ten-year-old schoolboy Vijay Persad, mourned their son’s absence as they ushered in another sad New Year. The family spent the first moments of the New Year deep in prayer for their missing loved one who was snatched on June 21, 2004 outside his Moruga home. Three men abducted little Vijay in a botched robbery attempt as he was closing the gates to the family’s small parlour. Since then, there has been no word from Vijay who, if he is still alive, would have celebrated his 11th birthday last June as a captive. And while the police have all but given up on Vijay still being alive, his family still pray. And await his return.

In an interview with Newsday yesterday, grieving father Ragkumar Persad, said on the stroke of midnight, he and his family offered prayers for their son’s safety and health as they greeted what is the second New Year without Vijay. “For the past two Christmases and two New Years, we have spent them in prayer because we are still hopeful that Vijay will return to us soon,” Persad said. “We have to have hope. We have to keep his memory alive and pray that one day he will return home to us and we are praying that he will return to us this year,” he added.

Persad said while the family was clinging to the hope that Vijay is still alive, the fact that the Police Homicide Bureau have termed his case as a murder, the family are struggling to cope with the grim reality that they may never see Vijay again. Vijay’s younger sister Anna, now four, still asks when her big brother would be returning home. “She does still talk about him and remember things that he used to do and make her laugh even though she was so small,” the tearful father said. Vijay, a former student of Robert Village Hindu School, would have wrote his Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) exams last year. No one was ever arrested in his abduction.