Officers of the Ghana Armed Forces stormed an alleged training camp of a group of separatists in the Volta Region in the early hours today and have rounded up 20 members of the group which calls itself the Homeland Study Group Foundation (HSGF).
The suspects comprising 20 males and a female were rounded up at their training camp in a forest in Kpevedui by more than 40 soldiers and crime scene investigators from the police for the operation.
As at press time, the suspects were being prepared to be airlifted to Accra for trial.
“We are convinced they are members [of the movement] but further investigations will establish other facts,” the Commanding Officer of the regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Baba Pantoah told the media.
Apparently, three other suspected separatists escaped the military loop. Octogenarian leader of the group, Charles Kormi Kudzodzi is reportedly on the run.
The group has been advocating the independence of former Western Togoland made up of Volta Region, Oti Region and parts of the North East Region, Northern Region and Upper East Region.
The Akufo Addo administration has called the bluff of the group which declared independence from Ghana late last year, saying they are not backing down.
In May 2019, approximately 80 leaders of the group were picked up by Ghanaian security agents in a full-scale military operation, however, barely a week after the arrest, the Attorney Generals Department dropped all charges and let the arrested separatists go free.
They had been charged for treason, abetment of unlawful assembly and offensive conduct conducive to the breach of peace. But, as soon as they were released, the group went back with more determination to separate from Ghana. Recently, the leadership of the group warned Ghana to hand-off the new oil finds in the region, threatening that the situation will become similar to the war-torn and oil-rich Niger-Delta area of Nigeria.
The group insists that their territory was illegally joined to Ghana on March 6 1957when Ghana became an independent country.