One of the bodyguards of former president of Ghana, John Mahama has been arrested.
He was reportedly arrested with a cache of arms and ammunition.
The suspect, Abdul Samed Yusuf, popularly called Matata, a civilian and one of Mahama’s Close Protection Officer’s (CPO) was caught alongside two serving police officers, Lance Corporal Emmanuel Abusah Yao and Lance Corporal Suleman Yussif, at a secret location at Alajo in Accra on Saturday morning by a crack team of policemen drawn from the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) Unit at the Greater Accra Regional Police Command.
This was after the police received information on Friday, December 17, about the movement of a group of men in possession of large quantities of arms and ammunition on suspicion of either planning something sinister or involved in the sale of guns.
The police were said to have detailed some plain-cloth investigators to Achimota, a surburb of Accra, where they met suspects Yao, aged 38, and another whose name was only given as Dokpor, and said to be a driver, aged 31, on board an unidentified taxi cab.
The police team were then said to have feign interest in buying some of the arms and ammunitions.
This made the suspects to open up to them, claiming they have all sorts of weapons for sale to their customers within the Accra Metropolis.
The suspects therefore scheduled a meeting for Saturday, December 18, for their newly found ‘buyers’ to come for any caliber they wanted to buy.
At about 8:00am on Saturday morning, the suspects contacted their new ‘buyers’, who unknown to them were police detectives from the Criminal Investigative Department (CID) at the Regional Police Command, that their supplier was ready to supply the weapons to them at Alajo.
The police team laid surveillance on the suspect, Yao, who met suspect Yussif, 37, at a location at Alajo, also a suburb of Accra, behind the Presbyterian Church.
This was when Mahama’s bodyduard, Matata, who is 40 years, arrived at the scene with an unregistered motorbike with a bag and brought out a Taurus handgun (pistol) and offered same for sale.
The police arrested all the suspects in the cause of transaction.
A search conducted in the bag of suspect Matata revealed 17 rounds of 9mm ammunition, 59 rounds of M16 ammunition, 38 rounds of AK 47 assault rifle ammunition and 58 rounds of G3 ammunition.
Nothing was found on the two other suspects, Yao and Suleman, according to the police source.
However, when a search was later conducted at the places of abode of all the suspects, three rounds of 9mm ammunitions were again found in the room of Matata at a location called Gutter in Nima, Accra.
It was during interrogations that it later emerged that Yao and Yussif were all Police Lance Corporals with the Police Visibility Unit at the Police Headquarters in Accra.
The police has since detained all three suspects and commenced a full-scale investigation into how they acquired those weapons and whether or not they have licence to be doing arms trade.
Portions of text culled from Dailyguidenetwork.com
