O'Reilly stabbing must be treated as a criminal case – Dr. Peter Anti

The Executive Director at the Institute of Education Studies, Dr. Peter Anti has called for a criminal investigation into the fatal stabbing of Edward Borketey Sackey, a final year General Arts student at O’Reilly SHS following an altercation.

Speaking on the incident on Metro TV on September 5, 2024, Dr. Anti emphasised that the police must take charge of the investigation and prosecute those involved in the student’s death.

He also added that the school head should be held accountable for the incident due to their failed supervision and allowing such a tragic incident to occur under their watch.

“For proper accountability, each individual student in the school is the responsibility of the head of the school and therefore the first person to be held responsible for this incident is the head of the school. Again, this should be treated as a criminal issue [sic] with the same position we have taken when incidents like this happens in our schools.

“This is not a case that should be looked at as a violent and a normal school fight. This has led to the death of an individual so this should be treated as a criminal issue and the police should take charge of it and ensure that whoever is responsible for that would be dealt with.

"...So, we deal with the criminal aspect and then we deal with the school supervision aspect which is under the authority of the Ghana Education Service so we can have two dimensions to this case,” he said.

Dr. Anti also called on the Ghana Education Service (GES) to conduct investigations into claims of teacher negligence in relation to the incident.

“The first dimension will be GES investigating to know what really happened because I hear the students talked about the teachers sitting unconcerned. I hear the students saying that there were cars in the school and nobody cared so it means that something really went amiss during that particular process.

“Of course, you cannot prevent students from engaging in this kind of argument and then fight but where you are a teacher and you see that it is escalating and someone has been stabbed, I think that it would take a teacher who is very wicked to just sit down unconcerned when you see a student lying down there with blood oozing from the body,” he stressed.

Meanwhile, the suspect in relation to the case has been remanded for two weeks into police custody by the LA District Court and is expected to appear in court on September 19, 2024.





MAG/MA