Bandits hit Mennonites of Springfield

Details are still hard to come by, but as I speak, Belmopan police are in the Mennonite community of Springfield investigating reports of an armed assault on residents. Eyewitnesses tell News 5 that around 5:00 p.m., several unmasked, but heavily armed men, invaded the community, located off the Hummingbird Highway, with robbery as the main motive. We understand that at least one resident, a fifteen-year-old boy, was able to run out to the entrance road where he met a construction crew who called the police. According to the young boy’s account of the incident, the intruders had physically assaulted several people, including children. Officers from both the Belmopan station and the Dangriga branch have been dispatched to the scene. The community of Springfield lies southeast of Belmopan, near the village of Armenia. Approximately one hundred Mennonites call it home, living simply as subsistence farmers who occasionally carry their produce to Belmopan using horse and cart. The area is but a few miles from the scene of a mass hold-up by a gang of gunmen that, in 1999, left one man dead and scores of victims traumatised.

Late word reaching News 5 is that the same gang has moved to Armenia where they robbed a bus en route to Dangriga from Belmopan.