Police arrest former Liberia Chief Justice

A Former Chief Justice of Liberia, Chea Cheapoo, who is in Ghana attending the ECOWAS brokered Peace Talks on his war-ravaged country, was arrested in Accra on Friday for alleged breach of the peace.

The police picked up Cheapoo, who has not been accredited for the peace talks that resumed on Friday after a week's break, when he insisted that he wanted to be part of the back-door political negotiations to carve an interim government for his country.

A source at the ECOWAS Secretariat told the Ghana News Agency at the M-Plaza hotel, the venue for the talks that had travelled for three weeks, that Cheapoo was later released, following the intervention of the Chief Mediator, General Abdulsalami Abubakar.

Meanwhile, General Abubakar is holding a series of meetings with the stakeholders of the Liberian crisis between Friday and Saturday to discuss their various memoranda for a comprehensive peace plan to end 12 years of bloody conflict.

The stakeholders include the International Contact Group on Liberia, the 18 political parties, women’s pressure groups, the Liberia Bar Association, Liberia Inter-Religious Council, youth groups and refugees from the Gomoa Buduburam Camp.

The rest are, the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL) and Liberians United for Reconciliation and Development (LURD) rebels, as well as the Liberian Government representatives.

Placard-bearing Liberian women groups have extended their three weeks of demonstration for peace in their country to the Staff College of the Ghana Armed Forces at Teshie, where the Security and Defence Commission of ECOWAS is meeting to deliberate on measures to promote peace and stability in the beleaguered West African state.