The attorney for Shadrach Arloo, who passed away in the West Hills Mall after a confrontation with the police, is requesting that the Inspector General of Police resign immediately (IGP).
In response to the treatment of Shadrach Arloo before his death, Francis-Xavier Sosu says he will ask President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to remove IGP Dr. George Akuffo Dampare.
Regarding Ghana In response to a statement made by the Ghana Police Service earlier today, Mr. Sosu said tonight on February 8 that the police rushed in making that statement since what they published there was not the complete report of the post-mortem examination.
“It must be placed on record that when it comes to homicide, be it first-degree murder or second-degree murder or in our case manslaughter or either intentional killing or negligent killing, there are several intervening factors because assuming that what police said is true and that he was choked on a foreign substance, it means that while this substance was in the throat of this young man, police managed to apprehend him.
“When you apprehend someone who has swallowed a substance, which you say is foreign, what will be the appropriate thing to do as police?” he asked, replying later that he could have been taken to the nearest health facility to get the substance removed and used as exhibit.
According to him, the dead would have been forced to spit the strange stuff out of his throat if his hands weren’t even shackled, as reported by 3News.com.
“But police handcuffs the guy, leaves him on the floor, and get others to either beat him or tase him on the floor until he died on the floor and so in recounting events leading to the death of this person, police conveniently blight all these things and simply say it’s because he got choked of foreign substance.
“For me, police is being disingenuous, police is not being truthful, police is not being candid and that is bad policing,” the lawyer, who is also Member of Parliament for Madina, said.
In their statement, the police claimed that the post-mortem examination conducted in front of interested parties, including the deceased’s attorney, demonstrated that he had been choked on an object that was foreign to him and later tested positive for drugs.
“The narrative of events, as gathered by the police, indicated that during the course of the arrest, the deceased pulled out a substance from his bag, which he quickly swallowed before anyone could stop him.
“He became unconscious shortly afterwards and was taken to the Sonotech Clinic for medical attention but was pronounced dead on arrival.”
But according to attorney Sosu, the police cannot evade responsibility for this incident, even though they are carefully adopting a position to do so.
“We are demanding a number of things that within the next seven days, the police should open up this investigation and make sure that anybody who is complicit is brought to book.
“Otherwise, we call for the immediate resignation of the IGP. If he fails to resign we are going to petition the President to remove him from office because you cannot be the head of police and see your officers misbehave this way and yet you want to use your own system to cover up for them.”
