Serial Killings: 25 Unidentified Were Foreigners

Network Herald investigations into the saga of the serial murders that rocked Accra and its environs some three years ago seem to collaborate perceptions held in certain quarters that the victims were foreigners.

Officials at the Police Hospital in Accra informed the paper that twenty five (25) of the murdered were buried enmass at the Mile 11 Public Cemetery on the Accra-Winneba Road to decongest the mortuary facility at the hospital to make way for new arrivals while five (5) were identified and claimed by their relations for burial.

The decision for the mass burial for the 25 was arrived at after tireless efforts by the hospital authorities to reach persons who might have lost contact with close relations who could possibly be victims of the dastardly act to identify and collect their lost ones. These include countless announcements in both electronic and print media with photographs. “Some friends and family members of the women who reported at the hospital managed to locate the bodies of their loved ones and arrangements were made to hand over the bodies to them for burial”. However, ten (10) of the murdered victims were duly identified but only five of them were actually collected for burial by the family members.

The pathologist’s report of the postmortem conducted on the victims and shown to the Network Herald suggested that while most of the women died as a result of strangulation, some ten or so of them were raped before being strangled.

“They had sperms and severe bruises on the vagina indicating they were raped prior to their untimely death. ”Confronted with the failure on the part of the general public to identify and claim the corpses, the hospital had no other option but resort to mass burial to reduce the enormous pressure that was being placed on the hospital’s morgue to prevent it from a possible breakdown.

One hospital source suggested that since some of the persons who reported at the hospital identified themselves as Liberians, Togolese and Nigerians who claimed they were friends of the victims with whom they engaged in prostitution, the most plausible conclusion could be that the unclaimed victims were foreigners who lived in the country and practiced prostitution.

For instance, a Nigerian lady who described herself as a friend of Theresa Mavis Tino, a 28-year Nigerian who was killed at Teshie in 1999 came to the Hospital to collect her friend but the authorities refused to release the body without the consent of the deceased family. Even when the lady returned to the hospital with a report that the relations of Mavis had refused to come down to collect their corpse because according them she was brought to Ghana by Mavis to practice prostitution and must be responsible for what has happened, the hospital refused to budge. She subsequently left and never returned.

An official who said he wasn’t part of the investigation but claimed adequate information from the investigators reiterated that the places where the women were dumped were very different from the spots where they were located.

The source however disagreed with the assertion that the corpses might have been brought in from neighboring countries, because some of the corpses appeared to have been killed not long before they were located and brought to the mortuary. Also the sperms found at the crime scenes and brought to the mortuary in addition to the bodies were fresh.Another interesting but intriguing part of the saga is the dismissal of Dr. Maale Adjei, the Pathologist who worked on 30 of the victims in 2001, for faking his status as a pathologist.

The dismissal had been necessitated by prolonged investigation by the Dental and Medical Council into the pathologist’s postmortem reports on the victims of the Serial Killing and certain acts that were least expected of a medical doctor.

Meanwhile the Network Herald has been told that the Director of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) has ordered the Homicide Unit of the department to submit all reports on the case to his office for an imminent press conference