The Minister of the Interior, Mr. Mark Owen Woyongo, has directed the Inspector-General of Police (IGP), to urgently address the plight of the wives of two policemen who were mistakenly shot and killed by their colleagues on patrol duty at Gomoa Pomade, near Winneba, in the Central Region on September 1, 2013.
The Minister expressed worry over the delay by the Police Administration to sort out the compensation packages for Mrs. Patient Opoku Tetteh, wife of the late Lance Corporal Opoku Tetteh, as well as the wife of the late Lance Corporal Francis Appiah.
Mr. Woyongo issued the directive in response to a question over a news story about the plight of the two women, published on the front page of the May 12, 2015 issue of The Ghanaian Times.
This was at a meeting with senior management of The Ghanaian Times during a working visit to the New Times Corporation (NTC) in Accra recently.
“We are equally concerned about the matter, it is taking too long to address it, we thought it should have been resolved by now,” Mr. Woyongo said.
The widows claim that their persistent call on the Police Administration to address their concerns had fallen on deaf ears, making life unbearable for them, especially, caring for their children after the untimely death of their husbands.
Mrs. Tetteh recently told The Ghanaian Times that during one of her visits to the Police Headquarters in Accra, a policewoman whose name she did not know rudely asked her to go and look for employment and stop harassing the administration for the payment of her late husband’s benefits.
The Ghanaian Times gathered that the wives of the two policemen had persistently been following up on the severance packages and other benefits of their husbands at the police headquarters, but to no avail.
It is recalled that on Sunday, September 1, 2013, the two policemen, stationed at Gomoa Pomadze, in the Central Region, were accidentally shot and killed by a police patrol team responding to a distress call over an armed robbery.
The two were initially thought to have been gunned down by the robbers, but the Ghana Police Service in a statement later, said they were inadvertently shot by the police patrol team.
The incident occurred, after the robbers had gone to rob some students of the Pan African Christian University College at their hostel at Gomoa Pomadze.
The patrol team, in a response to the distress call, had come across a private vehicle being driven by a policeman who was at the time conveying his injured colleague to the hospital.
In their judgment, the patrol team took the occupants of the vehicle to be the escaping robbers, and as such, pursued and fired at them, leading to the death of the two policemen.
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