Police arrests NPP Vice Chairman over 500 missing excavators

This follows a letter by the Minister of Environment, Science and Technology, Professor Kwabena Frimpong Boateng requesting the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) to probe Ewusi over the missing excavators.

Professor Kwabena Frimpong earlier indicated that dozens of excavators that were seized from illegal mining have disappeared from the district assemblies where they were being kept.

The minister said "though the excavators were seized and taken to the district assemblies, the heavy-duty machines disappeared later from the premises of the assemblies."

Excavators missing Pulse Ghana

Meanwhile, a group calling itself Concerned Small Scale Miners Union of Ghana had said that about 500 excavators seized during the intense crusade against illegal small scale mining between 2017 and 2018, are not missing as alleged but they are on various illegal mining sites in parts of the country.

"We were able to find some of these machines in Tamale. Some of these machines had tracking devices. So we can trace them," it said.

The Inter-Ministerial Committee on illegal mining was set up to oversee the implementation of the ban on all forms of small scale mining and also see to the vetting of small scale miners.