An emergency call to retrieve a vehicle abandoned in the course of a robbery took the police 10 days to respond. It took the persistence of a 70-year-old landlady, Maame Yaa Tiwaah, in front of whose house the vehicle was parked, with the assistance of some members of the Unit Committee of the area, to finally get the Suame Police in Kumasi to move to the scene to handle a vital clue in a recent sus¬pected case of armed robbery. This runs contrary to appeals by the police to the public to call with vital information that will lead to the arrest of criminals. Angry residents described the inertia by the police in the case as having the potential to destroy valuable investigative leads they could possibly have obtained from the scene of the alleged crime. When the Daily Graphic got to the scene last Monday, the KIA Pride taxi cab, with registration number AW 647 X, was parked in front of the house, with all the four side glasses rolled up and the doors locked. One of the front tyres was deflated and the vehicle had gathered considerable dust. A peep through the glasses revealed blood stains on the back seat directly behind the driver and a pair of scissors close to where the stains were. It could, however, not be ascertained whether the stains were of human or animal blood. But the police who arrived on the scene some few minutes after the Daily Graphic had inspected the vehicle were emphatic that the blood stains were those of the victim of the alleged attack. They alleged that the robbers might have used the pair of scissors to inflict cuts on their victim. According to Madam Tiwaah, on July 6, 2007, she saw the parked KIA taxi-cab in front of her house when she woke up at dawn to attend a special church programme. She said at that point she thought it had been parked there because it had run out of petrol and that the driver had probably gone to buy some or the vehicle might have developed a fault, compelling the driver to park it in front of the house. When finally the police broke into the car, it was realised that it had run out of fuel and that could be the reason it was abandoned. Chief Inspector Francis Cobbinah, in charge of the Suame Police Station, confirmed to the Daily Graphic that Maame Tiwaah drew his attention to the fact that a policeman at the station had told her to go and bring the abandoned vehicle, "but when she was asked to identify the police officer who gave her that wrong advice, she could not do it, even though they were the same people on duty on that day". According Chief Inspector Cobbinah, records at the station did not show that anybody had come to report a case of an abandoned vehicle on July 6, 2007. "It is the duty of the police to get a vehicle to go and tow vehicles that have been abandoned under questionable circumstances," he explained to the Daily Graphic. When the Daily Graphic visited the Suame Police Station, the abandoned vehicle had been parked in front of it. Source: Daily Graphic