-Shoots Dead Police Escort, Sparks Outrage
Whatsup News is picking up disturbing signals that the rising spate of armed robbery and assassinations in the country could partly be linked to a mix of many guns unaccounted guns imported into the country run-up to the 2020 elections and stray party vigilantes who had been given military training but are currently jobless.
Today, June 14, 2021, these prowling armed men on motorbikes struck for the umpteenth time and attacked a bullion van at James Town in Accra and shot the police escort, Constable Emmanuel Osei who was killed on the spot with his brain matter splattered all over the van.
Three armed men on two motorbikes with unidentified registration numbers attacked and robbed the unarmoured Nissan bullion van which has a registration number GT 8592 W and inscribed with the security company “Montran Company”.
The James Town District Police Command rushed to the crime scene and found the said van parked in the middle of Adedenko metal market road with the glasses shattered and the limp body of the murdered policeman of the National SWAT unit found motionless in the passengers’ seat.
The robbers who reportedly emptied the bullion van also shot and killed a female onlooker at the scene. Police claim they have launched an investigation into the gory robbery.
The incident has sent outrage through the Ghanaian public as it turns out the practically all bullion vans in Ghana are not armoured, sparking the incessant attacks on them by armed criminals.
The latest robbery comes a few days after audacious gunmen on motorbikes attacked the popular coffee shop Honey Suckle located directly opposite the Police Headquarters in Accra. They rampantly fired assault rifles into the coffee shop in broad daylight and still managed to escape on their motorbikes.
Reports picked up by Whatsup News indicate that some of these attacks could be linked to well-trained vigilantes associated with the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) and potential copy-cats.
Thousands of these party vigilantes have been given military training, armed with modern weapons, recruited into security agencies but some have been sacked or some are simply jobless.
Indeed, in 2019 when investigative journalist, Mannasseh Azuri Awuni exposed the De-Eye Group, an offshoot of the ruling NPP which were given preferential treatment to train at the Christianburg Castle in Osu, one of their trainers bemoaned how some of the trainees had resorted to a life of crime and had promised that they would be found jobs.
When the story broke, the Akufo Addo administration rebuffed the link, claiming that the De-Eye Group was “involved in helping unemployed young men and women find jobs,” suggesting that the trainees were not a militia group.
However, in August 2018, the Chief of Staff of the Group, Fraser Owireku Kegya was asked by TV3 how different his vigilante group was from the rest. He said, “De-Eye Group is all over the 10 regions of the country and we [have] over 5000 members [increasing] every day. You understand, and De-Eye Group is made up of youth of this country that believes in the ideas and the policies of Nana Addo Dankwa’s government.”
Eventually, when a detachment of reportedly from this group conscripted into an illegal SWAT unit at the National Security Secretariat unleashed a hail of bullets on unarmed civilians during the bloody Ayawaso West-Wuogon by-elections, a member of Commission set up to investigate the incident Prof. Henrietta Mensah-Bonsu warned of the dire consequences of these party militias.
Professor Mensah-Bonsu suggested that they should be called “militia” and their commanders called “warlords” because of their violent nature.
The De-Eye militia was formed by one Nana Wereko Addo, alias “Choman” who was incidentally a former bodyguard of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo before he became President.