Judith Yaa Kumah, a victim whose ear was allegedly partly cut off during a police interrogation at the Tema Community 8 station, has called on the office of the Inspector General of Police (IGP) for immediate investigation and justice.
Speaking to the media on behalf of his client, private legal practitioner Andrew Khartey explained that it was extremely unconstitutional and against the rights of his client for her ear to be chopped off over a claim that she looked like a member of a robbery gang captured on a CCTV footage.
According to the legal practitioner, it was even more wrong to subject his client, a pregnant woman, to that treatment.
“And in the course of interrogations, a police officer by the name Clement Suputour, chops off the right part of her ear with a pair of metallic pliers, only because, according to him, she is connected to a certain person of police interest and also that she looked like somebody who had been captured in a CCTV footage of a robbery incident at Tema, a few weeks earlier,” he explained in an interview on Joy News.
He added, “Now, you wouldn't believe it. This young lady at the time was a few weeks pregnant, a fact which the police knew of because they had conducted a pregnancy test and had the results. Now, it had to take me so much effort for the police to release the medical records of her to enable us to apply to the court for the variation of her bail conditions.”
Explaining how she ended up in police custody, the victim in an interview with Crime Check on Citi TV recounted how she was arrested on February 29, when she visited her boyfriend, who is behind bars.
Narrating the sequence of events, she said when she came to the police station, she was asked to sit at the visitors' side for about 30 minutes, after which a police officer asked her to join her boyfriend who was behind bars.
In the police cells, the victim said she inquired from her boyfriend why she was asked to join him but he reassured her that everything would be fine.
A few minutes later, she said CID Suputour handcuffed her and drove her to Tema Community 8 Police Station. She was sent to a CID office where a policewoman, her daughter, and a labourer were present. In the office, she was interrogated, during which process she was asked who one "Survivor" was.
Despite several attempts to explain to the officer that she does not know who “Survivor” is, the officer kicked her to the ground and began pressing the perforator against her ear, dragging it until a portion of her ear nipped off.
She explained that she didn't know who "Survivor" was, but the police insisted that Survivor was a friend of her boyfriend.
EAN/BB
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