Afoko to face murder charge

The Criminal Investigations Department (CID) of the Ghana Police Service has received advice from the Attorney-General’s (A-G’s) Department to charge Gregory Afoko and Asabke Alangdi with the murder of the Upper East Regional Chairman of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Mr Adams Mahama.

The Director General of the CID, Commissioner of Police (COP) Mr Prosper K. Agblor, disclosed this to the Daily Graphic in Accra on Thursday. He said the CID, after its investigations, forwarded the docket on the case to the A-G’s Department for advice.

On May 20, 2015, Mahama, a contractor, was showered with acid when he was returning home from work about 11 p.m. He died a day later at hospital but was said to have mentioned Afoko and Alangdi as his assailants.

In the advice, Mr Agblor said, the A-G’s Department indicated that there was sufficient evidence to warrant the charge of the two suspects with two counts of conspiracy to commit crime, to wit, conspiracy to murder and murder.

Manhunt for Alangdi

The police, he said, had intensified the hunt for Alangdi, who has been on the run since the incident. Alangdi is said to have fled his home with his wife and left behind their one-year-old son.

“Anybody with information that will lead to the arrest of Alangdi will be handsomely rewarded. We are working with our counterparts outside Ghana to get him arrested if he is out of Ghana,” he said.

Musa Issa to be freed

In the course of investigations, Mr Agblor said, the police retrieved a blue-black track suit with burns in it from Afoko’s room, and a report from the Ghana Standards Authority (GSA), following a forensic examination, showed that the burns were acid burns.

He also said Afoko, who was still in the custody of the police, would be charged accordingly. The charge statement, he said, would then be forwarded to the A-G’s Department for it to include it in the bill of indictment and summary of evidence.

Afoko in court

Afoko, who has, since his arrest, been appearing before a magistrate’s court, would then be convicted by the lower court to stand trial in a higher court. The A-G advised that there was not enough evidence to charge one other suspect, Musa Issa, who is alleged to have solicited and procured the acid used for the crime.

Issa has already been granted bail by the magistrate’s court.

Mr Agblor said an autopsy report signed by Dr Lawrence Adusei, a pathologist at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, on May 24, 2015 attributed the cause of Mahama’s death to shock lungs and extensive acid burns.

Credit: Graphiconline