PARAMARIBO--When police announced on Wednesday morning that they had arrested five armed Asian men on Wednesday who had painted their faces black and appeared to be out on a robbery spree, the responses varied.
Some people thought it was funny “because the Chinese are copying everything,” but others rightfully pointed at how deliberately the Asian criminals had intended to fool authorities and their suspects into thinking that their crimes had been committed by black men. “I am happy with this arrest, because it would have been my poor black brothers who would carry the blame for this. And I am sure this robbery they were out to commit would not be their first,” one person commented on the Facebook page of the Suriname Police Corps.
The five Asian men were arrested at Johannes Mungrastraat in southern Paramaribo early Wednesday morning. Police say their officers had thought it suspicious that the men were sitting in a vehicle on the parking lot of Choi’s Supermarket around that hour. When the officers addressed the men, they realised that their accents did not correspondent with the dark hue of their faces. They all turned out to be Chinese nationals.
Inside their car police found handguns, a shotgun, wigs and tools burglars use to break into buildings. The men whose identities were not released, have been handed over to the Capital Crimes department.
The arrest of the black-faced Asian robbers comes on the heels of heated debates that followed on Facebook, after an Indian Surinamese man made racially loaded comments about black men being “devils who live to rob other races,” that “Suriname would be a beautiful place if black people did not live there” and that “Indians should teach their wives and children how to handle guns so they can kill black men.”
