he recent interdiction of two police officers over the swapped cocaine exhibits is a clear exoneration of the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) whose interim report on the subject pointed at the Ghana Police Service as the source of the anomaly.
Speaking to Daily Guide on the issue, a top security operative (name withheld) recalled how when the interim BNI report was made public, the Police Administration rubbished it in an attempt to evade official reprimand and even put out a GH¢50,000 reward for whoever helped in resolving the conundrum of the swapped cocaine.
Daily Guide has learnt that the BNI are still investigating the subject even after the release of the interim report which nailed the Police because they think there could be more things to discover. Another aspect of the interim report took issue with the contacts made with the suspect at the centre of the case while she was in custody.
It would be recalled that in the heat of the cocaine swap last year at a time when the then President John Evans Atta Mills was out of the country, the then Vice President John Mahama ordered the BNI to investigate the matter and submit a report within a fortnight.
The judiciary and the Police came under the public spotlight as Ghanaians suspected one of the two institutions of being responsible for the swap until the BNI report was released.
DSP Gifty Mawuenyegah Tehoda’s spilling of the beans pushed the Police to take the action it did recently when it interdicted the Second in Command at the CID Headquarters, Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) Vincent Dedzro and Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Kofi Adzei Tuadzra, Head of the Narcotics Unit.
The security official asked rhetorically, “if the Police rubbished the BNI interim report at the time it did on what basis are they interdicting the two persons?”
DSP Tehoda pointed out that it was the police and not the judiciary which was responsible for the cocaine swap when she made good her threat of spilling the beans.
It was amazing the security official noted “that even after the report, the Police Administration did not deem it necessary to query anybody within its ranks especially those at the narcotics unit until Tehoda’s spilling of the beans.”
With the recent development there is no doubt that the police have turned their sights inward given their rather difficult position of accepting that they and not the judiciary are the source of the cocaine swap.
The latest development which triggered the interdiction of the two police officers emanated from a petition sent to the President by DSP Gifty Mawuenyegah Tehoda against her dismissal from the Police Service. She pointed at ACP Dedzo, Deputy Director-General of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) as being the principal character behind the swapping of the cocaine with sodium bicarbonate (baking soda).
In the six-page petition DSP Tehoda told the President that her dismissal was “as a grand scheme by the CID to use me as a pawn to cover up obvious wrongdoings within the set-up.”