A Tema-based man of God, Pastor Marvin Brown alias Prince Mark, has been arrested by the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (DOVVSU) of the Tema Regional Police Command for having carnal knowledge of a 14-year-old member of his church, resulting in the boy acquiring HIV.
Pastor Brown, the Spiritual Head of the New Jerusalem Religion at Tema Community 4, allegedly sodomised the boy on five occasions and warned him not to disclose the act to anyone or he would die.
The Tema Regional Police PRO, ASP Olivia Turkson confirmed the arrest of the suspect to Daily Guide yesterday.
She said the pastor was arrested after the parents of the Class 4 pupil of a Tema basic school reported the incident to the police.
Sources close to the family told the paper that they suspected the pastor might have infected the boy with HIV after the boy tested positive for the deadly disease.
The pastor, during interrogation by the police, admitted sodomizing the boy but denied that he had sex with the teenager five times.
He said it occurred only once under the influence of alcohol after an outing with the victim who was living with him in his house.
The father of the victim was said to have joined the New Jerusalem Church and later became friends with the pastor.
The victim subsequently became a member too when his father went with him to fellowship.
The pastor, sometime in November Last year, requested the father of the 14-year-old to allow his son to come live in his house anytime school was on vacation, to which the victim’s father agreed.
The pastor was said to have used some games on his laptop and mobile phone to entice the boy, after which he lured him into his bedroom where he had unprotected sex with him.
The father later realized that his son frequently fell ill after he had returned from the pastor’s house. The man sent his son to the hospital and after a series of medical tests, it was confirmed that the boy was HIV positive.
The parent were tested too by the same medical facility and were found to be negative, raising fears that the victim might have been infected by the ‘man of God’, especially after he mentioned to his parent that he had been sodomized five times by the pastor.
The pastor Mark admitted in his explanation that he sodomized the boy, but insisted it occurred only once.
He told Daily Guide that he was bisexual and therefore had sex with both men and women.
He also mentioned that his libido got high anytime he drank alcohol.
According to him, on the day he sodomized the victim, he had gone out with the victim and his female secretary where he drank Guinness and Malt.
He explained that later when he and the victim got back to his house, he felt like having sex, so he called his girlfriend who was based in Accra to come over to his place, but she declined to do so, with an explanation that it was too late.
“Realizing that my libido was high, I decided to masturbate; and after a while when I relised that I was about to come (discharge), I rushed and inserted the tip of my penis into his anus where I ejaculated and that was all,” he remarked.
Asked if he had on any occasion had sex with any man apart from the victim, he answered in the affirmative and added that it happened so many times but outside Ghana.
“I must say that all the times that I have sex with men I was always on top and not down,” he pointed out and explained that he always penetrated and had never been penetrated by any man before.
He indicated that he had tested negative for HIV some time ago but did not know his current status.
But the victim said the pastor was economical with the truth, having sighted the man of God and his friend having sex in the pastor’s house.
Pastor Prince Mark, who has his advertising board’s scattered around Tema, especially around Community 1 area, was being detained to help the police in their investigation.