Corpses Betray Policemen

The Accra Mail has information from its police sources that two motor hearse drivers of the Police Hospital who were arrested last weekend by Customs officials for allegedly using the hearses to smuggle goods. They have already been handed over to the Police administration for the necessary action

They had carried corpses to the Volta and Eastern regions and decided to lend their services to transporting smuggled goods. When the vehicles were searched, they were found to contain several pieces of wax prints.They were named as Sergeant Amoako, driving a Mercedes Benz hearse bus who was arrested on the Aflao road and Sergeant J.K. Tetteh, driving a similar vehicle, arrested near one of the Tema Motorway toll point.

They are presently being held in the cells of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) head-quarters in Accra.The source could not immediately tell when they would be put before court, or whether they would rather subjected to an internal administrative inquiry, but said investigations are continuing.

He suggested that the police authorities might want to have a wider internal investigation to go to the very root of the action in order to see how widespread such actions are in the police.

Just as this story was being written word filtered in that the suspects had been interdicted pending the outcome of investigations. The Public Relations Director of the Ghana Police Service, Mr. Angwubutoge Awuni confirmed the story and said should investigations prove their guilt, the suspects would certainly be shown the exit from the service.

Three weeks ago, the police opened its doors to the media to see its rotten and dilapidated infrastructure; what was kept under wraps was the role of the police itself in arriving at such a sorry pass. Stories like this one about the two police alleged smugglers would not help the police image.

If it is any comfort to the Ghana Police, land travellers between Ghana and Nigeria say Ghanaian police personnel are angels compared with those of Togo, Benin, and Nigeria where extortion seems to be institutionalised and a concept of "zero tolerance for corruption" would be laughed out of existence!