As Radio Gold bounces 4-year old tape into action—— Charles Quansah Speakes

Four years ago, convicted alleged women serial killer Charles Quansah revealed in a secretly-recorded tape message that he was not responsible for the murders of the 34 women who were allegedly killed in the run-up to the 2000 elections. He also denied that he was responsible for the murder of 9 of the women he allegedly confessed to, explaining that after going through excruciating torture, when he was being pressurised to confess to killing 9 of the women, he retorted in typical cheeky Ghanaian fashion: " I killed 90, not 9". That was what eventually became his so-called confession to killing 9 of the women.

Charles Quansah then made a series of explosive revelations. According to him, one Superintendent Issah, whilst torturing and brutalising him, suggested to him to implicate former President Jerry Rawlings and his wife Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings, as the ones who hired him to kill the women. He said Superintendent Issah in typical "good cop, bad cop" fashion later promised to make things easy for him if he implicated the Rawlingses. Charles Quansah insists on the tape that he refused simply because it was not true – he did not know the Rawlingses and the Rawlingses did not know him and he had not been hired by them.

Still exploding with "bombs", Charles Quansah revealed that another police officer, possibly Inspector Onipa (the name is indistinct on the tape) next suggested to him that he should add [Vice President] Aliu Mahama to the list of his hirers, to which he responded that he did not now who Aliu Mahama was. These revelations, which have been known to the Ghana Palaver for 4 years because we have had a copy of the tape in our possession for that length of time, were made public for the first time last Tuesday when Radio Gold played the tape-recording of Charles Quansah’s version of events on its "Sixty Minutes" programme.

According to Radio Gold, it was forced to play the tape because sections of the media had last week out of nowhere put out stories suggesting that Charles Quansah and relatives of his had confessed to his serial killing of the women. It will be recalled that Ghana Palaver came very close to publishing the contents of the tape in August 2003 but stopped short when Nana Akomea, then Minister of Information, announced at a Press Conference that preliminary investigations had implicated the NDC and the NDC Ministers involved in the Quality Grain Affair who were then in prison at Nsawam in the tape-recording.

The NPP Government clearly suspected that a recording of Quansah had been made but did not know who had done it or where the tape was. Consequently, the NDC Ministers and officials, Messrs Kwame Peprah, Ibrahim Adam and Dr. George Yankey, were dispersed to Ho, Kumasi and Koforidua Prisons respectively. Nana Akomea also promised at the August 2003 Press Conference that a final report of the investigations would be released and would show how the NDC and its agents had conspired with Quansah to implicate top NPP officials in the murder of the women. That final report was never released and so we also never published the contents of the tape.

An intelligence analyst contacted by Ghana Palaver explained the sudden upsurge of the Charles Quansah news in the pro-NPP media last week as follows. Concerned over possible defeat at next year’s elections, the NPP needs an excuse to have Charles Quansah executed since it is feared that a living Charles Quansah would "sing" once the NPP was out of power. After all, "dead men tell no tales".

According to the intelligence analyst, after waiting for 4 years without the Quansah tape being put to any use, the NPP must have convinced itself that the existence of the tape was a hoax, and therefore unleashed its guard dogs in the private media with the fabricated stories of alleged confessions of Charles Quansah and his sister. This was to set the stage for President Kufuor to sign the Death Warrant and the Attorney General to sign the Execution Warrant so that Charles Quansah could be legally hanged to silence him permanently. The last thing they expected was for the tape to be sprung on them the way it has been done by Radio Gold, sending all their plans awry. Ghana Palaver today brings to readers flashbacks to its 2003 publications in which we adverted to the existence of the tape and dared Nana Akomea to come out with the final report of the so-called police investigations so that we would also come out with the details of Quansah’s "true confessions". Unfortunately Nana Akomea did not take up the challenge and never released the mythical so-called final report. From next week, we shall begin a serialisation of Charles Quansah’s "true confessions" played on Radio Gold last Tuesday.