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The Criminal Investigations Department (CID) of the Ghana Police Service has mounted an intensive search for the arrest of Aisha Asumda, alias Aisha Boku Masi, a 36-year-old shea butter seller suspected to be the mastermind of the latest police recruitment scam that rocked the country last Saturday.

Already, one of Aisha’s accomplices, Alifa Adams, alias Abass, a 27-year-old unemployed, has been picked up by the police at the Tesano Royal Hotel in Accra following a tip off.

Accomplices
The CID is also on the heels of five other accomplices of Aisha’s who were named as Peter Atariwuni Seidu, an accountant with the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly (KMA); Mafin Yaano Williams, Joshua Palba, 35, unemployed; Ariel Lamptey, 31, and Wuni Salinko, alias Mohammed Mamudu, a 39-year-old businessman, all residents of Accra. 

Briefing journalists in Accra yesterday, the Director-General of the CID, Commissioner of Police (COP) Mr Prosper Kwame Agblor, said Aisha and three of her accomplices were first arrested on December 24, 2014 after they had committed a similar offence.

Put before court 
He said after investigations, the four were put before an Accra Circuit Court in January 2015 but were granted bail to reappear on a later date, only for them to go back and allegedly engage in another recruitment scam.

Describing Aisha as a serial fraudster, Mr Agblor said she and her accomplices were scheduled to reappear before Court Nine of the Cocoa Affairs courts yesterday for the first case but managed to sneak out of the court before the police got there.

Many calls
He said from September 2014, the Human Resource Department of the Police Service had received calls from individuals all over the country about an ongoing recruitment into the service.

Mr Agblor said intelligence gathered over the period indicated that suspect Aisha, while on her shea butter trading activities in the three northern regions, made representation to the effect that there was an ongoing recruitment into the Police Service.

Aisha and her group managed to collect money from more than 300 people, amounting to GHc1.2 million, in November 2014 and gave the victims forged letters of offer of enlistment, along with a list of training prospectus.

Military Hospital 
When they were arrested in December 2014, at the 37 Military Hospital where they had gone to collect more money from the wives of military personnel working at the hospital, the police retrieved GHc58,500 from them.

According to the Director-General of the Human Resource Department of the Ghana Police Service, COP Mr Patrick Timbilla, in spite of several public notices that the police had not embarked on any recruitment exercise and the advice to the public to desist from paying money to anybody, they continued to do that with impunity.

He said henceforth every victim of a recruitment scam would be arrested and charged with possession of forged documents, an offence punishable under the law.

Background
Last Saturday, hundreds of young men and women who turned up at five police training depots for enlistment into the Ghana Police Service left disappointed.

They found that their recruitment letters were fake and that the purported enlistment was a scam.

It took the police a hectic time to drive away the victims, most of them university graduates, who had gone to the Kumasi, Koforidua, Pwalugu, Accra and Ho Police depots with their luggage to begin the training.