The General Secretary of the incumbent National Democratic Congress (NDC), Johnson Asiedu Nketia, is demanding answers from the Inspector General of Police (IGP) on the weapons allegedly retrieved from the headquarters of the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) last month.
The police is said to have retrieved the weapons when some persons claiming to be disgruntled members of the NPP, stormed the head office at dawn and allegedly broke into some offices.
In the process, the men, some of whom were dressed in military uniform and allegedly using a military vehicle, destroyed some party property and also stole a computer hard drive from the office of the party’s Director of Elections, Martin Adjei Korsah-Mensah.
[contextly_sidebar id=”JzXNUtrfhrcTQqHqDArgj3opPcGjn01w”]Some eleven persons who were arrested for their role in the alleged raid, are standing trial and have since been granted bail.
Conflicting reports had suggested that the said weapons were deliberately hidden at the premises by those who carried out the raid.
The NPP has accused government and the national security of carrying out the raid in an attempt to deepen the party’s internal strife and make them appear as a violent party.
The Ghana Armed Forces and Government have since denied any involvement in the raid. But the NDC’s Johnson Asiedu Nketia, has revived the issue demanding an investigation into how the guns were allegedly found at the headquarters.
Mr. Asiedu Nketia, who was speaking at a TEIN programme at the University of Cape Coast, is worried that the headquarters of the main opposition party had been turned into an “armory”.
He said the arms were potentially a threat to national security going into the 2016 general elections and asked the police to make the outcome of investigations on it public.
“We heard that there were guns that were retrieved at the party headquarters; the police went in to do some arrest and quickly our brothers [The NPP] have tried to shift the argument from answering the question as to why a party headquarters ought to be an armory and they are now concentrating on the people who came there whether they were sent by the NDC or the NPP or someone else…we want to demand from the IGP that the nation needs to know; first of all whether it is true that there were guns retrieved from the NPP head office; by whoever we don’t care; but we must know whether there were arms”.
He added “Find out how those arms got there and what the intentions of the arms were because if it happens that the major opposition party can be keeping arms in their headquarters then nobody can guarantee the security of this country. If the purpose is for them to distribute the arms to their followers to create mayhem in the country and make the country ungovernable, should we sit and keep quiet?” he quizzed.
It still remains unclear whether indeed weapons were found at the party headquarters, since the police has not directly responded to that specific allegation.
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By: Ebenezer Afanyi Dadzie/citifmonline.com/Ghana