The suspects
The prosecution in the trial of four persons on trial for allegedly kidnapping two Canadian ladies in Kumasi in June this year has handed over GH¢650 to Sampson Aghalor who is alleged to be the leader of the kidnap gang.
The money was part of the items confiscated from the accused person when he was arrested by a combined security team in Kumasi.
There was a disagreement between the police and the lawyer for the accused persons over how much money they had on them at the time of their arrest.
While Jeff Omarsa, one of the accused, claims the police are holding on to his GH¢600, the investigator in the matter, Detective Mathew Anokye, told the court that there is no such money with the police.
The Detective, however, agreed that Sampson Aghalor, the mastermind of the kidnapping group, has GH¢650 with the police which will be released to him as directed by the court.
Appearing before the court presided over by Justice Mensah-Datsa, a Court of Appeal judge sitting as an additional High Court judge yesterday, Hilda Craig, a senior state attorney, handed the money over to the court and it was subsequently given to the accused person’s lawyer, Yaw Dankwa, to count.
She, however, told the court that there was no record of the police taking any money from Jeff Omarsa.
“We do not have any money with us. This is because what we have on record for him is a mobile phone so per our records, no money was taken from him”, Ms. Hilda told the court.
Meanwhile, she had indicated that the prosecution was yet to file all their disclosures.
She indicated that they filed another batch of documents last Wednesday and were waiting for some documents from Canada which are very crucial to the case.
Trial
The four were alleged to be part of a kidnapping syndicate which had planned for few months how they were going to kidnap white foreigners in Ghana and make their relatives pay some monies as ransom before they were released.
Sampson Aghalor, Elvis Ojiyorwe, Jeff Omarsa, all Nigerians, and a Ghanaian, Yussif Yakubu, have each been charged with two counts of conspiracy and another two counts of kidnapping.
They have been put before the court for allegedly conspiring to kidnap the two young ladies who were in the country for volunteering works and later demanded a ransom of $800,000.
The four were arrested after Yussif Yakubu was captured by a joint security team on June 11 and he led the team to arrest the other suspects.
The accused persons are said to have exchanged gunfire with the joint security team and threatened to kill the ladies if the team came closer.
BY Gibril Abdul Razak