The grisly murder of a famous business woman, 30, near Koforidua, the gruesome beheading of a six-year old boy near Sunyani and the gunning down of four armed robbers in Kumasi in a shoot-out with the police marked a weekend of blood and horror for some residents of those parts of the country.
At Abesim, near Sunyani in the Brong Ahafo Region, hundreds of residents besieged the crime scene, eager to catch a glimpse of Ernest Kwame Awuah, alias President, who was on display with the mutilated body of his six-year old nephew, Charles Sey.
Awuah allegedly pierced Charles’s right eye and ear and then slashed his throat.
The victim was the son of the suspect’s younger brother.
Briefing the Daily Graphic after the bizarre incident which happened about 11 a.m. on Saturday, the Sunyani Municipal Police commander, superintendent Charles Botwe, said following a report from a resident, he dispatched a team of policemen to the deceased grandmother’s house where the little boy lived and the team found the suspect carrying the body of the boy on his lap in a room where he had allegedly committed the crime. Charles’s body has been deposited at the Regional Hospital in Sunyani for autopsy.
According to Mr. Botwe, the police had found it difficult to take a statement from the suspect, since he was behaving abnormally, but noted that a caution statement had been taken from the suspect’s father, while the police were yet to take another one from Charles’s grandmother, after which Awuah would be put before court.
At Okorase in the new Juaben municipality of the Eastern Region, news of the Sunday morning murder of Rita Baah, affectionately called Afia Ata, allegedly by a fetish priest, spread like bush fire through the town.
The deceased, a resident of Effiduase in Koforidua who operates a cosmetics shop and boutique at the Dasebre Roundabout in Koforidua, was said to have been hit several times on the forehead with a hammer by the fetish priest at his shrine at Okorase about 12:30am.
After the crime, Joseph Tetteh, the 35-year old traditional priest, popularly known as Mallam was reported to have tied the victim’s hands and legs, covered it with a cloth and placed it on his motorbike in an attempt to dump it at a spot far away from Okorase and create the impression that she had been knocked down by a vehicle.
However luck eluded him when he was spotted by passengers travelling along the Okorase-Mamfe road about 1.30am with the body of the deceased stretched across the motorbike.
He was reported to have swerved to the left of the road where he abandoned both the body and the motorbike and fled into a nearby bush at Tei Nkwanta near Okorase.
That was after the passengers attempted to question him over where he was taking the body to.
Supt Naami said a team of police investigators was immediately dispatched to the scene where they found Rita’s tied body covered in a cloth on the motorbike, with registration number GN 8843 Z.
He said the police traced the motorbike to the fetish priest’s house but they never found him.
However, some of the youth of Okorase and Tei Nkwanta, two neigbouringg communities, mounted an intensive search and arrested Tetteh in a bush at Tei Nkwata about 1a.m on Sunday.
During interrogation, Tetteh was reported to have told the police that some unknown people had killed Rita but that he had only attempted taking it to dump it somewhere.
Meanwhile, when the Daily Graphic visited the New Juaben Central Police Station, a large number of residents, including the family of the businesswoman and her boyfriend, were seen in utter shock and tears over Rita’s death.
In the Ashanti Region, the Regional Police Command took the fight against armed robbery to another level at the weekend when they shot dead four suspected armed robbers, all believed to be in their late 30s, during a gun battle at Konkromase,a suburb of Kumasi.
Friday night’s operation was the second biggest police offensive against armed robbery in Ashanti this year and the dead suspects brought to 26 the number of armed robbers killed by the police in the region this year.
One of the four robbers was identified as Abdul Rasak Ibrahim alias Fante-Fante.
Rasak,described as a hardened criminal, had earlier been arrested in a robbery case but he was granted bail by a Kumasi High Court in November 2006 but had since failed to appear before court.
Two others were identified only as Fiifi and Rashid, both ex-convicts, with the fourth one yet to be identified.
They were among a group of seven armed robbers who had gone on a robbery spree in the rainy night.
They were actually in the process of attacking the fourth victim when men from the Police Buffalo Unit encountered them.
According to the police, those who managed to escape bolted with cash of GH95,000 believed to have been taken from victims of the robbery operation.
A number of offensive weapons, including four pump action guns, three locally manufactured pistols, 21 live ammunition, eight spent cartridges, one heavy duty cutter and two mobile phones were retrieved by the police from the scene of the shooting.
A KIA taxi which the robbers had snatched from its driver and a Nissan Pathfinder, which they took from its female owner after shooting her in the right shoulder, were later found abandoned at various locations in the country.
DCOP Timbilla said the robbers shot the woman who was returning from work, before taking her vehicle away.
The Nissan Pathfinder was later found abandoned at Buokrom, together with the bag which contained the GH¢95,000.
Source: Daily Graphic/Ghana