Yaw Asante Agyekum was wrongly jailed for 23 years
Yaw Asante Agyekum, a motorbike mechanic who was falsely detained in connection with one of Ghana’s most infamous criminals, has shared a harrowing account of his ordeal.
In an emotional interview on The Nana Aba Series on YouTube, Yaw recounted how police officers staged a photo to falsely implicate him as an armed robber.
“I will never forget this. I have never held a gun before. I am not an armed robber. But guns were laid before me, and I was given some amulets to wear just to take a photograph to frame me as an armed robber. That really scared my relatives when they saw the picture, even though the items were not mine,” he said.
“At the time of my arrest, I was holding only a motorbike key—nothing else. But when they took me to the police station, they placed old guns in front of me and took a photograph to support a false story. This was during the time when now-retired Police Commissioner Rose Atinga Bio was at Nkawkaw. Some officers who knew me actually vouched for me, saying I wasn’t a criminal, but others insisted I was an armed robber.”
Yaw Asante Agyekum was arrested in 2002 and later convicted in 2010 of conspiracy to commit murder. He was accused of working as a mechanic for the criminal gang of notorious armed robber Ataa Ayi, which operated across Accra in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Ataa Ayi and his gang were convicted of multiple counts of robbery and sentenced to 160 years in prison. Agyekum, however, appealed his conviction, with his lawyers arguing that the prosecution had failed to link him to any of the crimes.
On June 5, 2025, the Court of Appeal acquitted and discharged Yaw Asante Agyekum, who had been sentenced to 35 years in prison. The court found that Agyekum had no legal representation during his original trial and agreed with the defense that the conviction was not supported by sufficient evidence. The ruling finally brought justice to Agyekum after more than two decades of wrongful incarceration.
The three-member panel of Justice Aboagye Tanoh, Justice Stephen Oppong, and Justice Janapare Bartels Kodwo noted that the prosecution failed to ‘give enough evidence to warrant conviction and sentence.’
I was given arms and dressed with amulet for a photograph to corroborate a story that I am a thief.
Hmm 😔 https://t.co/0L7Dgzi4KG pic.twitter.com/1uwAq9LJu0
— Serwaa Amihere (@Serwaa_Amihere) June 9, 2025
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