Terror Alert: Safety measures at hotels questioned

The Executive Director of African Centre for Security and Counter Terrorism, Emmanuel Kutin, has raised doubts about the preparedness of some hotels in Accra to counter activities of terrorists.

A survey, Mr. Kutin noted he was a part of on 14th and 15th of May, conducted in some hotels in the capital revealed that most of these hotels have several security vulnerability including defective scanners, inactive CCTV and security protocol that could be exploited by terrorists.

“We went round top hotels in Accra and it will shock you the scanners are not even working. And then you ask yourself, who are the regulators, have the regulators gone to sleep?” he wondered.

He made the revelation in a telephone interview with Winston Amoah on 3FM on the security alert report from the Africa Center for Security and Intelligence Studies (ACSIS).

The report said the Salafi-Jihadist group has been operating in and out of Ghana’s border with Burkina Faso over the past four months.

Churches in the Northern region in Ghana have been put on high alert as it emerged that the group had churches and mining zones along the border as targets. The Salafi-Jihadist militants killed four customs officers at a checkpoint at Nohao near the Ghana border on February 15, 2019.

Mr. Kutin noted that the survey revealed that a basic process of checking the identification cards of guests before they are checked in have been ignored by some of these hotels.

“These hotels must not put profit before security,” he admonished.

According to him, it is mandatory by law for guests to provide some form of identification before they are checked in.

“What should the receptionist do with such information. It is about time such information had some kind of collaboration in real-time with the national security operation such that background of the tenants can be checked.

“If you look at terrorist attacks around the world, most often than not, the people [terrorists] will have to live among us for some time and plan their attacks,” he observed.

In the same vain, Mr. Kutin charged landlords and landladies to ‘as a matter of urgency’ develop a habit of conducting a background checks on their clients.

Mr. Kutin suggested: “Our landlords as a matter of urgency should not be renting to people, including Ghanaians without trying to know their background. Because, more often than not, the foreigner uses surrogates to rent the property for them. That is why land lords and landladies must cultivate the spirit of trying to find out the background of their tenant.”

He added that the National Security could create a control system that would link all the hotels in the country with its system.

In his estimation, until the state is able do some of these things, the security agencies can only react to these attacks after they have happened.