Haruna Iddrisu attributes Kumasi shooting to ‘law enforcement failure’
The MINORITY Leader, Haruna Iddrisu, has attributed the alleged shooting and killing in Kumasi to “law enforcement failure.”
He called for application for the law without fear or favour, to bring perpetrators to book.
“In the matter of the happenings in Kumasi, the law must deal swiftly, decisively and ruthlessly with any person associated with the event,” Mr Iddrisu told journalists in Parliament, yesterday.
Two members of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) were allegedly shot by unknown gunmen at the entrance of the party’s office in Kumasi, on Monday.
One of the men was pronounced dead on arrival at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital with the other responding to treatment.
Responding to police communication that the alleged perpetrators were on a motorcycle, Mr Iddrisu said the police ought to have closed in on that “but if you [police] already begin to have your assumptions and presumptions that is worrying.”
Distinguishing between the Kumasi shooting and the Ayawaso West Wuogon by-election violence, the Minority Leader said the Ayawaso concern is “State sponsored violence. It is not tolerable anywhere in the world when the state, with its apparatus, which has a primary responsibility to protect life and property, itself unleashes violence.”
He said that any form of vigilantism was unjustified, and there was the need for a national conversation to improve “our democratic process by doing away with vigilantism.”
The Interior Minister, Ambrose Dery, however, in a separate interview with the Ghanaian Times, said the security was on top of the issue, and would bring the brains behind the shooting to book.
Violent crime, Mr Dery said, was inevitable because even advanced countries in the world record such crimes.
What is critical, he said, was how to punish the wrong doers to put fear into people, and prevent them from repeating same, a course he said, the police was on top of.
BY JULIUS YAO PETETSI
