Keta calls for police transfers after brutal armed robbery on MP-elect
Fear-stricken, the Keta MP-elect, Kwame Dzudzorli Gakpey, says he knocked on the door of the local police station several times.
His heart had been knocking too, furiously at his chest from all the adrenaline-supported pumping of blood to assist his escape from a brutal armed robbery at his home at Anlo-Afiadenyigba last Friday.
His heart did not fail him. But the police did.
“Nobody was there to help me,” he spoke from his hospital bed, recovering from the beatings from menacing men who stood over him with pump action guns and AK-47 rifles weighing the option of giving him life or taking it.
But while undecided at that moment, the men were decidedly robbing and ransacking his household and masterfully covering their tracks.
‘They took away the CCTV camera recordings’ he said as he counted his losses – a looted mobile money shop, 25,000 cedis from his home, phones, pistol, laptops, and even an attempt to escape restfully in his car.
That Saturday’s 60 minutes of terror involved six of his household – his father and mother, his brother, ‘even the little kid’. The errand boy suffered a fracture, head injuries, and some gun-buttings to his body.
The hooded assailants wore military fatigues and khakis and barked around the home while they kept the terrified politician locked inside a room.
He said he escaped through a dormant backdoor, scaling over a wall in a frantic fight for his life as death lusted for it.
‘They told my brother that It is me that they wanted to finish,’ he said.
This all happened Friday dawn.
Monday morning, the Keta MP-elect is not at the police station. His constituents are. They hover around the station, many standing up to the front.
They say they want all the police officers transferred. They say, the officers have been sleeping on the job, tranquilized by too much familiarity, and officers are now held in contempt.
The police has said it has made two arrests in connection with the armed robbery and has urged the residents to remain calm. Volta Regional Police Public Relations Officer, Sergeant Prince Dogbatse, has said it is providing security at the hospital.
The residents say they have lost faith in the police that was missing in action.
It was action-packed thievery perpetrated by armed robbers whom the MP-elect says had the luxury to walk for an operation and walk out after finishing the job.
Throwing in his support, the Keta MP-elect said “I perfectly agree with the community.”
He said some of the police officers have been in Keta for 10 to 15 years without being transferred.
Only Wednesday, Kwame Dzudzorli Gakpey was savouring a victory at the parliamentary elections which he predictably won on the ticket of the NDC.
It marks a new dawn for him as he begins a political life on the national stage. But it is a victory marred and the people and their politician are now asking for a new dawn of policing in Keta.