By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Feb. 17, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

The real culprit behind the Feb. 9 brutal murder of Akyem-Abuakwa North MP Joseph Boakye Danquah-Adu may be in the predictable process of being let off the hook; and until such independent and reliable investigative agencies as the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and Scotland Yard (SY) are brought in, and promptly so, it is virtually certain that the case would be closed shortly without real justice having been brought to bear on the head and shoulders of the killer. We are all fully aware of the fact that the real mastermind behind Mr. Danquah-Adu’s murder is not the man the police want the public to believe they have in custody.

I have already called for the 2016 Presidential Candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), who also happens to be a cousin of the deceased, to promptly step into the fray and call for the immediate involvement or takeover of the case by either the FBI or Scotland Yard. Already, there are quite a slew of active assassination case files that the personnel of the Ghana Police Service appear to be having a difficult time resolving. Even where the criminal suspects involved have been reportedly apprehended and duly charged with murder, the judicial system has shown predictable signs of disturbing prosecutorial paralysis or incapacity. You may be apt in calling it judicial fatigue.

I am here, of course, referring to the Adams Mahama assassination case, in which the younger brother of the suspended National Chairman of the New Patriotic Party, Mr. Paul A. Afoko, has been standing trial for the brutal acid-dousing murder of the former Upper-East Regional Chairman of the New Patriotic Party. It is a clear case of assassination because Mr. Mahama’s death came closely on the heels of violent factional clashes at the Bolgatanga regional headquarters of the NPP, which also directly and actively involved both Mr. Paul Afoko and the latter’s well-known political right-hand man and suspended NPP General-Secretary Mr. Kwabena Agyei Agyepong. A letter written and widely publicized by Mr. Mahama about two weeks before he met his brutal death amply testifies to the preceding observation.

The credibility of this strong circumstantial evidence is further boosted by the suspended NPP National Chairman’s spirited, albeit woefully abortive, attempt to criminally concoct an alibi for his shortly to be arrested and indicted brother, Mr. Gregory Afoko, described at the time as a 51-year-old farmer, and two other accomplices, namely, Mr. Issah Musah and Mr. Asabke Alangdi, who remains at large with his wife, largely through the criminal instrumentality of the prime suspect, according to Bolgatanga police investigators.

In the case of Mr. Daniel Asiedu, the 19-year-old prime suspect in the stabbing death of Mr. Danquah-Adu, it was initially revealed by police investigators to the media that Mr. Asiedu had personally confessed to having been contracted with the sum of GH? 2,000 (Two-Thousand Ghanaian Cedis) to execute the victim. But now it has come to light that the slain Abuakwa-North MP’s killer has changed his story and is singing a different tune. In the latest report, Mr. Asiedu is alleged to be claiming that he had broken into the home of Mr. Danquah-Adu with the sole and unprompted purpose of robbing the late chartered accountant (See “MP’s Death: Suspect’s Account Full of Inconsistencies – Attafuah” Adomonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 2/17/16). Mr. Asiedu had even reportedly claimed to have used some of his blood money to buy himself a pair of shoes.

As renowned criminologist and lawyer Prof. Kenneth Agyeman-Attafuah has pointedly observed, it well appears that some form of external pressure or duress has been meted the suspect to get him to do the politically correct thing, which is precisely what Mr. Asiesu appears to be doing presently. In sum, this new song-belting is aimed at letting the real criminal mastermind behind Mr. Danquah-Adu’s assassination off the hook.

And this is precisely where unrelenting pressure needs to be mounted on police investigators in order to get them to revisit the topography and sociology underlying the gaping leap or gap between Mr. Asiedu’s original story of him having been contracted to rub out Mr. Danquah-Adu, to the present poppycockish narrative of the prime suspect’s having supposedly undertaken, solo, the common criminal act of burglarizing and robbing the victim which event, somehow, mysteriously went awry and culminated in the brutal stabbing death of Mr. Danquah-Adu.

Indeed, even as Prof. Attafuah rightly points out, the sinuous intricacy with which Mr. Asiedu allegedly committed the crime for which he is presently charged, bespeaks of something far more complex and sophisticated than the common crime of burglary and/or robbery. In other words, this repulsively bloody act of murder has all the classical markings of a deliberately and deftly planned, strategized and symphonically orchestrated crime in the striking manner of a contractual assassination. The plot is thick and heavy with official involvement. And the Ghanaian people and the family of the slain man have an inviolable right to get to the bottom of this most heinous of crimes against humanity.

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