He Was A Criminal Suspect, Not A Killer

Anybody with a little historical knowledge of the hauteur institutional temperament and behavior of the personnel of the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF), could readily have predicted that long before the videotaped suspects in the early-morning’s brutal lynching of Capt. Maxwell Adam Mahama got arraigned before a legitimately constituted court of law of the land, at least a couple of these suspects would have been equally barbarically executed. The reference here, of course, is to the horrific discovery of the corpse of one of the alleged attackers seen on videotape stoning Capt. Mahama to death in an uncompleted building in the village of Modase, near Denkyira-Obuasi, just this Thursday, June 1 (See “Captain Mahama’s ‘Killer” Found Dead” MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 6/1/17).

The suggestion here is not necessarily that the criminal suspect had been summarily executed by some understandably outraged members of the Accra-based 5^th Battalion of Infantry of the Ghana Armed Forces, who had swarmed Denkyira-Obuasi and its environs in the aftermath of Capt. Mahama’s death, in a publicly declared thirst for revenge and bloodshed, but that possibility cannot be totally overruled. From the description of the crime scene in the referenced news report, it clearly appears that the suspect had been methodically slain, although it is much too early for anybody to draw definitive conclusions about the same, while the Diaso District Commander of the Ghana Police Service, Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP) Osei Adu Agyemang, and his men and women investigated the crime.

It is highly unlikely from the evidence presented in the news report that the suspect committed suicide, as one may easily be tempted to presume, because the body of the deceased is reported to have been clutching a polythene bag which contained an ID-card bearing the name of “Francis Bio” and his age as 46. We cannot draw any definitive conclusions on this count as well, because neither the news reporter nor the aforementioned police commander tells us the fact of whether the picture of the alleged ID bore any physical resemblance to the deceased. The ID may very well have been planted by the killers of the victim.

As well, whether, indeed, the dead man appears on the videotape showing the killers of Capt. Mahama or not is decidedly beside the point, as it were. For, it goes without saying that ours is a constitutionally democratic culture in which absolutely no citizen accused of a crime may be sentenced to die so barbarically by any anonymous group of executioners outside the jurisdiction of a legitimately constituted court of law. What we find here is precisely the same barbarous mentality that precipitated the mob lynching of Capt. Mahama. The Diaso police must work meticulously and expeditiously to get to the bottom of this case and the perpetrators, irrespective of institutional affiliation or station in life, promptly brought to justice.

Contrary to the routine practice of our men and women in military uniform in the recent past, nobody has a right to take the law into his/her own hands. Our journalists also need to demonstrate above-board professionalism of the highest order. Under absolutely no circumstances should the caption of the news story reporting the apparently violent death of Mr. Francis Bio, assuming that, indeed, that was the name of the deceased, have contained the adjectival-noun of “Killer.” The standard practice of good journalism is to describe all persons accused of a crime but not yet indicted, tried and convicted as “suspects” or “criminal suspects,” never as “killer” or “killers,” even enclosed in quotation marks.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
June 1, 2017
E-mail: [email protected]