“No Malice Behind Request For Cocaine Re-test”

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    Lawyer Senanu Kobla, the counsel for Nana Ama Martin, the lady at the center of the cocaine swapped saga, said there was no malice or conspiracy intended when he requested for the re-testing of the exhibit after the substance was admitted into evidence.

    According to him, he did so solely on intuition that the substance was not cocaine. He also hinted that he did so partly because he did not trust the police.

    “Until the [police] brought the exhibit, opened it and tendered it then I suspected it,” he told the four-member Justice Dodzie committee. “As I indicated to the court that peculiar unique scent with wax around momentarily the moment it is opened was not there. ”

    “In its block form it is concentrated and it comes with a pungent scent… Since the day I raised the objection there was sleepless night at the police headquarters,” he added.

    Meanwhile, the Police forensic expert who tested the substance suspected to be cocaine when it was intercepted in 2008, Superintendent David Agyeman Adjem, told the committee that the substance from which the sample was taken for the re-testing was not what he had tested.

    According to him, the normal elements present in a cocaine exhibit were not present in the sample that had been presented to him at the hearing on Friday.

    Under cross examination, Mr. Agyeman was requested to examine the exhibit which was presented at the Cocoa Affairs Court 1 on the 27th of September 2011, to indicate whether it was the same thing he had been presented with in 2008.

    Upon scrutiny, however, he indicated that the parcel he had looked at could not be described as cocaine because it did not have the qualities of cocaine.