Anti-Dampare plot: I was not planning a coup or cocaine sale - COP George Mensah

Retired Commissioner of Police, George Alex Mensah has maintained his innocence in the leaked audio recording in which he and another senior officer was captured plotting the removal of the current Inspector-General of Police, Dr George Akuffo Dampare.

According to COP Mensah, the entire conversation with former Northern Regional Chairman of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Bugri Naabu was a private conversation which did not border on any criminality.

“Like me and you having a conversation privately in your room or my room, then you secretly record it, you bring it out and, you will not even bring the conversation that we had out; you edited the conversation.

"You doctored it and you brought it out. So I was not afraid of anything because I knew what actually took place and I did not say anything wrong in the tape.

"I was not planning a coup in the tape; neither was I planning to go and sell cocaine or steal. No! all what I said in the tape is the truth and it’s right and as I said at the Committee, if you give me the chance I will say it here, I will say it anywhere,” he told Evans Mensah of Joy News in an interview aired on Monday, October 15, 2023.

In the said audio which has since become the subject of a seven-member parliamentary committee investigation, COP Mensah and two other police officers are accused of seeking to court political support for the removal of the IGP.

While pushing for COP Mensah as the ideal replacement for Dr Dampare, the officers touted him as true supporter and member of the ruling New Patriotic Party who will help the party advance its agenda of maintaining power in 2024.

They further called the competence of Dr Dampare into question while accusing him of being an ally of the opposition National Democratic Congress.

On whether his conduct was partisan, COP Mensah said he made the claims as a lobbying tactic.

“Unless somebody doesn’t want to speak the truth, there is no position in this country that people don’t lobby or people don’t hold people’s hands to go and see the appointing authority. So that was not news,” he stated.

He refuted the accusation of plotting the IGP’s removal emphasising that the power to do so did not lie with him or the people captured in the tape.



GA/SARA

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