Police swoop on arms cache

The police said on Sunday that they are investigating separate cases in which an arms and ammunition dealer and a businessman, were suspected to have flouted regulations regarding the sale and possession of weapons.

This followed the retrieval of more than 1,000 assorted guns and a large quantity of game-bore cartridges from the magazine of Kwame Addo, an arms dealer in Accra, on Saturday during a joint police-military swoop.

The weapons include double-barrelled shotguns, garden guns, pump action guns and baikal shotguns, Deputy Commissioner of Police Yaw Adu-Gyimah who led the joint team, said on Sunday.

He said at the house of businessman Michael Soussoudis, the team found 15 shotguns, six pistols, a revolver, eight packets of cartridges and 32 pieces of nine-millimetre ammunition. Out of these, three shotguns and two pistols were unlicensed.

Also found in the house were two bayonets, three binoculars and two day-and-night telescopic sights.

Adu-Gyimah said the team had to carry away all the weapons and ammunition to reconcile with official records. He said Soussoudis has been granted police bail after submitting a written statement.

Meanwhile, Addo, who was said to have travelled out of the country at the time of the swoop, was believed to have been opening the magazine and selling the weapons without recourse to the police as provided by the regulations.

According Adu-Gyimah, arms and ammunition dealers are required to submit a duplicate of keys to their magazines to the police who should be present each time it is being opened.

This is to enable the police to keep track of all arms and ammunition being released and make sure that only people with no questionable background acquire them.

He said Addo and Soussoudis as well as any other person proved to have flouted the laws would be prosecuted.

Soussoudis hit the world headlines in the middle 1980s when he was arrested in the US for spying for Ghana.

His US girlfriend, who was then working in the US embassy in Accra, was also arrested for passing over information to him.

Soussoudis was swapped with several Ghanaians who were arrested for spying for the US in a bargain. The Ghanaians were denaturalized and sent to the US.

Following the expiry of a government moratorium for voluntary submission of illegal weapons last Monday, the police have launched an operation to recover arms and ammunition still in unauthorized hands. "It is going on well. Public co-operation has been very encouraging," Adu-Gyimah said.