The otherwise boisterous suburb of Krofofrom (New Tafo) in Kumasi went dead last Friday around midnight, when some notorious youth in the area assisted by their counterparts from Asawase, another suburb of the city, combined forces to lynch a soldier at the main traffic lights.

Afraid of a possible reprisal from the colleagues of the deceased, drinking spot operators, food and other vendors quickly packed their goods and left for home, leaving the place dead silent.

Not even the attempt by the soldier to flee could save him from the angry youth who were determined to exhibit their machismo on the soldier.

Eventually, they succeeded in subjecting him to beatings at different locations, all around the traffic lights area, and finally dumped his unconscious body at a place called 'Columbia', where drug addicts and hardened criminals hang around.

According to eyewitnesses, the soldier was in a yellow and white Opel Astra caravan taxi, whose registration number they could not pick, with two other colleagues when they spotted a young man wearing military uniform (camouflage).

They ordered the young man to remove the uniform, which they believed he was wearing unlawfully.

The eyewitnesses said the soldiers managed to get the uniform off the body of the young man and pushed him into the taxi in which they were travelling, ostensibly to take him along for questioning as to how he came by the uniform.

Their encounter with the young man, the eyewitnesses continued, created a scene and it attracted lots of people to the area.

It was at that point that the youth, some of who were around when it all started, got incensed and resisted the soldiers.

They eventually released the boy from his military captors and went ahead to engage the soldiers in a heated argument. Tempers rose high as the enraged youth broke the rear screen of the taxi.

It was at the height of the tension, they said, that the other two soldiers allegedly sped off leaving their colleague behind at the mercy of the angry youth.

"At a point during the beatings, they raised him high up and hit him hard on the ground," another eyewitness told the Daily Graphic.

The Graphic said its enquiries at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH) revealed that no soldier had been brought to the hospital. The Public Relations Officer of KATH, Mr Kwame Frimpong, said the records at the hospital's mortuary, Intensive Care Unit, and the Casualty Ward did not have any information on the soldier.

Around 11 a.m. on Sunday morning, when the Daily Graphic went to the headquarters of the 2nd Infantry Brigade to find out whether they had received reports of an alleged killing of one of their colleagues, there was nobody to comment after almost 45 minutes of waiting at the gate.


Source: Daily Graphic