A 25-year-old commercial driver, Osei Manu, has been taken to a hospital after enduring over an hour of brutish assault that has left him with serious body injuries, swollen eye and chest pains.
He was reportedly assaulted by four city guards of the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly (KMA).
The four members of the KMA taskforce are said to have taken the law into their own hands and given the defenceless driver strokes of wire mesh whips after handcuffing him.
DAILY GUIDE gathered that the incident happened around 3pm on Monday inside one of the offices of the KMA taskforce at the Race Course lorry terminal in Kumasi. No statement had so far come from the assembly under Kojo Bomsu, the Metropolitan Chief Executive.
As at press time yesterday Osei Manu remained hospitalised at the Tafo Government Hospital in the Garden City, battling for his life, while the Suame District Police Command has instituted investigation into the incident.
DSP Kofi Oduro Monku, Suame District Police Commander, confirmed the incident and stated that detectives had been assigned to unravel the cause of the action for the perpetrators to be brought to book.
The battering began after Osei, who shuttles between Kumasi and Manso Keniago, was invited to the KMA taskforce office to answer a charge of stealing of a colleague’s car tape.
Brother of the victim, Harrison Asiamah, told DAILY GUIDE that about an hour later he found people trooping into the KMA taskforce office to catch a glimpse of an ongoing incident, and he also followed suit to find out what was amiss.
According to him, on arriving at the scene, he heard the victim screaming for help in a locked upper room at the KMA and therefore attempted to force the door open.
He narrated that some of his siblings, who had come around, helped him to open the door, and to his amazement, found his brother’s (Osei Manu’s) hands in cuffs behind his back.
“When we went to his rescue, we discovered that members of the KMA taskforce had beaten him, with vestige of strokes of wire mesh at the victim’s back,” Asiamah disclosed and added that Osei confirmed to them that the wounds were from whips made of wire mesh.
Harrison Asiamah said the victim was rushed to the Tafo Government Hospital for treatment after police at the Suame District Command had issued them with a police medical form.
Osei Manu, in an interview with DAILY GUIDE on his hospital bed, corroborated the account of his brother and said he was assaulted on the basis of a complaint by a colleague driver, Baba Yusif, that he (Osei) probably had stolen Baba Yusif’s car tape from his vehicle about a week earlier.
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