A High Court in Accra has sentenced a retired soldier, Joseph Abusah and a pastor, Benjamin Kofi Agbetiafah to six months’ imprisonment each for the manslaughter of a taxi driver who allegedly purchased an item with a counterfeit GH¢50 note from the pastor’s mother.
The two had been standing trial since 2018 over the death of 32-year-old taxi driver Solomon Dapaah.
They were charged with manslaughter after they brutally assaulted the taxi driver, who later died at the Agbogba Clinic in Accra.
A seven-member jury found the two men guilty of one count of manslaughter and conspiracy, and the court subsequently sentenced them to six months’ imprisonment each to run concurrently.
The incident happened in March 2018 when the deceased allegedly purchased soft drink at the pastor’s mother’s shop with a GH¢50 note and was given a GH¢40 change.
The shop owner, suspecting that the money was counterfeit, raised an alarm which drew the attention of Joseph Abusah and Benjamin Agbetiafah.
The two men chased the taxi driver with a Nissan pick-up and accosted him at the outskirts of New Abiadjei, a suburb of Accra, after Abusah blocked the deceased’s taxi with the pickup to prevent him from driving on.
They then pulled him out of the taxi and subjected him to severe beating. They later tied his hands and legs with a nylon rope and sent him to the Agbogba Police Station in the bucket of the pickup to lodge a complaint.
The police officers, upon seeing the condition of the victim, escorted the two and the taxi driver to the Agbogba Clinic, where Solomon Dapaah was pronounced dead upon arrival at the clinic, leading to the arrest of the two convicts.
A post-mortem examination conducted at the Police Hospital in Accra, by a pathologist on March 13, 2018, gave the cause of Dapaah’s death as severe head injury resulting from lynching, classifying it as an unnatural death.
A Daily Guide Report