Farmer Before Court For Murdering Only Daughter

...with a cutlass supplied by him

A 28 year old farmer, James Dekpey suspected of conniving with four others in murdering his seven year old daughter, Rose Dekpey at Klikor near Agbozume for ritual purposes on Friday appeared before an Aflao circuit court on provisional charges of conspiracy and murder.

Also in the dock were his relatives Kwabla Dekpey and Emmanuel Kundo Dekpey, also farmers and both natives of Glidzi, a farming community near Klikor in the Ketu District. The others were Nelson Mandela Akli, 38, a building contractor, the architect of the act and his brother Christian Akli, 26, a mason, also natives of Glidzi, but both based at Ashaiman, near Tema. Their pleas were not taken. The court presided over by Group Captain Martin Obeng-Ntim (retd), remanded the five in police custody to be brought before the court again on Friday September 2 this year. Police Chief Inspector Kofi Frimpong of Aflao told the court that Mandela and Christian visited Glidzi on August 29 this year and told the victim's father in the presence of the others that he would make them become wealthy through human blood.

According to him, James agreed to Mandela's demand to donate his daughter, his only child, who was then residing with her grandmother at another part of Glidzi for the purpose. At 10a.m. on Saturday September 3, James went for the victim in the absence of her grandmother and sent her to a spot in the bush near Satsimadza, a former refugee camp near Agbozume, on the Aflao-Accra Highway, where the others were ambushed, waiting as arranged. On arrival, they laid the girl on the ground, her father holding her arms firmly onto the ground with Kwabla, Emmanuel and Christian holding the legs while Mandela slit her throat with a cutlass supplied by the victim's father, and they then threw the body at a different spot.

The prosecution said the police visited the scene and found the body of the little girl with its throat slit after some boys hunting birds in the bush had found the body, and investigations led to the arrest of the victim's father. According to him, the victim's father confirmed the act and narrated its chronology to the police, who later arrested the others including Kwabla and Emmanuel, who initially went into hiding. The prosecution said when the police visited the murder scene, no blood traces were found, suggesting that the blood that oozed during the act might have been collected into a container. The victims body has been deposited at the Ketu District Hospital morgue at Aflao pending autopsy.