There was drama at an Accra Central Magistrate Court yesterday when a 22-year-old man who is being tried for allegedly strangulating a seven-year-old girl to death, asked journalists to pray for him.
The accused, Lucas Agboyie aka Gabriel or Kojo, a mason apprentice, had asked journalists who had rushed to take shots of him after proceedings, to ask God to “forgive him.”
Meanwhile, the court, presided over by Ebenezer K. Ansah, has adjourned hearing of the case until November 9, 2016 for the state to begin the committal hearing.
This was after Mrs. Francisca Tete-Mensah, a Principal State Attorney, had told the court that the state had still not received the original docket from the police based on which the state would prepare its bill of indictment for the committal hearing.
She explained that since the last court date, the investigator was sent on an official duty in the Northern Region and was also unable to do what he had to do in respect of the forwarding of the docket to the Attorney General’s (AG’s) Department.
Mrs. Tete-Mensah stated that the AG was asking for time to be able to receive the docket by hand from the police, especially when an earlier attempt to send same to the AG’s office through a motor rider had failed.
She added, “Things are not as gloomy as it appears; we are watching with the eye of an eagle…”
Mr. Ansah said in any case the fact that the investigator was on an official assignment in the Northern Region does not mean he was not in the same country, indicating, “I don’t want to talk today…”
The investigator who was in court gave the assurance that the docket would be sent to the AG’s office by the close of the week.
Last month Gabriel shocked the court when he gave a vivid account of how he killed the girl and had sex with the corpse for three hours.
He said he murdered the girl after smoking weed and informed the victim, Ruth Amankwah, that he wanted to have sex with her.
Lucas, also nicknamed Sympathy or Sky Lover, told the court that the deceased tried to escape from him but pulled her back to indicate his seriousness.
He said not even the pleas from Ruth to spare her were enough to save her, adding that he pressed the throat of the victim until she was dead and had sex with her in his metal container at Kubekro No. 1 near Atadeka at Ashaiman in the Greater Accra Region, on April 19, 2015.
While stressing that he had regretted the act, he claimed that he did not know what led him to kill the girl, although he admitted smoking weed prior to the act.
Charged with murder contrary to Sections 46 of Act 29/60, the plea of Sympathy has not been taken.
Ruth was a class one pupil of the Meshach Academy School at Zenu also in Ashaiman, who lived with her mother at Kubekro where the accused also lived about 200 metres away from them.
At 8 am on Sunday April 19, 2015, the mother of the deceased prepared porridge and sent her with GH¢20 to buy bread from a nearby shop for their breakfast.
Having waited for a long time without Ruth returning home, the parents became alarmed and searched for her in the area but to no avail, until an informant told the complainant that she saw Sympathy pulling the girl into his metal container.
The search team found Ruth’s naked body lying lifeless in a supine position on an old student’s mattress with blood oozing from her mouth and nostrils. Sympathy was subsequently nabbed.
Pushed further for names of possible accomplices by the search party, the accused initially insisted he killed Ruth on his own volition and later mentioned one Baba Ali as the one who contracted him to murder the victim for money, house and a car.
By Jeffrey De-Graft Johnson
jeffdegraft44@yahoo.com