General News of Saturday, 7 February 2015
Source: Starrfmonline.com
The intervention of Police Officers at the St Paul’s Boys’ High School at Denu in the Volta region, saved two students, who were suspected to be gay, from lynching by their angry homophobic colleagues.
The two alleged gay students are currently in the custody of Police Officers who have launched investigations into the near-attack as well as the killing of one student by a Police Officer’s stray bullet in the midst of the mob attack on the gay students.
The student who was shot in the head by the Officer was in his first year.
The angry mob of students vandalised school property, smashed the windows of a car and surged on the teachers’ bungalow to vent their spleen on some Teachers they accused of protecting the alleged gay students.
Authorities have temporarily closed down the school following the incident. Ghana’s laws frown on sodomy and “unnatural carnal knowledge.”
The Criminal Offences Act 29 of 1960 § 104, 3 Laws of Ghana (rev. ed. 2004), says a “person who has unnatural carnal knowledge of … another person of not less than sixteen years of age with the consent of that other person commits a misdemeanor,” an offence punishable on conviction by a maximum three-year prison term.
The Criminal and Other Offences (Procedure) Act 30 of 1960, § 296, 3 Laws of Ghana (rev. ed. 2004), defines “Unnatural carnal knowledge” as involving “sexual intercourse with a person in an unnatural manner” and requires “the least degree of penetration.”