Today in History: Former presidential staffer in shock after police allegedly pulled gun on him

A former Presidential Staffer in the John Mahama administration, Ben Dotsei Malor in February 2020 recounted a harrowing life-threatening experience he suffered at the hands of a police officer.

Mr Dotsei Malor in a Facebook post revealed that a police officer without confrontation pulled a gun on him.

Read the full article as first published by GhanaWeb on Tuesday, 25 February 2020, below

Ben Dotsei Malor, a presidential staffer in the John Mahama regime has recounted a “harrowing experience” in the hands of a policeman over the weekend with a claim the officer of the law pulled a gun on him without any provocation.

“I've just had a policeman pull a gun on me in the Atomic Roundabout. Then he apologises at Legon Police Station,” a Facebook post from him moments after the incident on Sunday read.

Despite the apology and forgiveness, the chief editor at United Nations News on Monday made another post condemning the act. While serving notice of his intention to take the matter up, he explained that the motive behind his decision is to protect others “who could be shot and killed or bullied, intimidated, and harassed to scorn and ridicule.”

“This is now not about me, but about preventing what I went through from happening to any brother or sister - not even to an ‘enemy’ or to anyone who considers me their ‘enemy’…. It would be irresponsible, uncaring, and reckless of me not to take steps to ensure others are spared the horror, the shock, and the terror of what still seems to me to have been a bad bad dream,” he sought to clarify.

Recalling how it happened, Mr Malor said:

“I was driving at Atomic junction, it’s a very slow roundabout traffic… Basically, I got somebody I didn’t know to have anything to do with – the police and security agencies – pull a gun on me. He first challenged me for having a phone while in that crawling traffic. I wasn’t receiving a call, I wasn’t talking. If there is one thing that will constitute guilt, I had the phone in my hand. I was Google mapping.

“He came to my passenger side, shouted, and screamed. And I said ‘did I take the phone from you? Is that your phone?’ I think this question really triggered something. He got upset, he took his motorbike… next thing I knew, as I was trying to find a way out of the roundabout, he had gone and thrown his motorbike right in front of my car, proceeded to jump quickly from the ground and straight up to my passenger door, yanked the door opened, screaming at me, telling blatant lies – ‘you knock me down, you knock me down’…”.

Malor mentioned that the policeman pointed a gun at him in the process. The officer then ordered him to follow him to the Legon Police Station. One Kweku Asante, a man who according to Malor, was a witness to the incident decided to follow them in order to testify in his [Malor] favor. Mr. Asante, per Malor’s account, was attacked by the police officer in question.

“I had to call a lawyer professor friend of mine. He came, the police after several minutes of asking me questions instead of querying the officer told me to forgive the guy and that the guy is begging me for forgiveness. If he had known it was me [he wouldn’t have done what he did],” he said.

Watch Malor narrate his ordeal below: