16-Year-Old Locked In Cell

Policemen from the Monitors Unit of the Ghana Police Service are alleged to have beaten and detained a student of the Great Lamptey Mills School and his uncle on 31st December 2006, Id-Il-Adha (Sallah) Day. Uncle and nephew met their fate just after the festival prayers at the temporary praying ground at Japan Motors on the way to the Abossey Okai Roundabout.

The teenaged boy, Mohammed Aminu, eyes blood-shot, called at the offices of Daily Guide in the company of his aunts to tell the story about how his mufti-dressed assailant told inmates of the cell into which he was locked up at the Striking Force, “beat him up.”

According to the boy, “after the festival prayer at the Japan Motors temporary praying ground, I decided to go and see my uncle who is a filling station attendant at the nearby Goil Fuel Station.” He said his uncle asked him to go and buy some snacks by the roadside and as he stood waiting to spot a seller, he was slapped from behind.

“Just as I turned round to find out what it was all about, my assailant gave me another slap,” he disclosed, adding, the man who slapped him was in civvies but he later discovered that he was a policeman.

“After taking the second slap, I retaliated and a struggle ensued between me and the man. Just as the struggle was going on, a Ford carrying a squad of uniformed policemen pulled up and the occupants jumped out and descended on me. It was then that I realized the man who slapped me was a policeman.”

Continuing, he said, “They beat me with the butt of their weapons as a crowd stood watching. My uncle who came to search for me, found me being beaten.”

When his uncle, Mohammed Nuhu Alhassan, the Goil Filling Station attendant, asked if his nephew had done something wrong, he too was descended upon, the boy narrated. The two were bundled into the waiting Ford pickup and driven straight to the Central Police Station and locked up.

Mohammed Nuhu Alhassan was locked up in the Central Police Station and his nephew at a Striking Force cell.

A police medical attention form dated 30th December, 2006, was issued to Mohammed Aminu. Details of the form, signed by a Chief Inspector, indicate that the assailed youth lives in house No. C 52/2 Adabraka.

Mohammed Nuhu Alhassan, whose hand was in a sling, claimed he was denied a hospital form when he asked for one.

“The duty NCO told me that there was no such thing as a hospital request form and so I had to seek medical attention at the Ridge Hospital,” despondent-looking Mohammed Nuhu Alhassan told Daily Guide.

Mohammed Aminu, the 16-year-old boy, said as he was being released from the cells, his main cop assailant, a certain Gilbert Aga whose rank he could not determine and who had reported a case of assault against him, threatened, “You think it’s all over eh? I’ll find you out and kill you.”

A Chief Inspector, known only as Kyei, was said to have told the victims of the brutality that “it’s part of life”- an implication that they should take it as accidental and consider it as though it never happened.

When the Chief Inspector was called last Tuesday, he sounded very courteous, appeared to be ignorant about the incidence and promised to find out what happened. A relation of the assailed, Dr. Basiru, was said to have called the Greater Accra Regional Police Commander, ACP Asiedu Akrofi, to lodged a complaint.