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Less than 24 hours after his arrest, a Bolgatanga Circuit Court presided over by Judge William Boampong, has sentence a 27-year-old staff of the National Youth Employment Programme (NYEP) and a National Democratic Congress (NDC) activist, Yakubu Mohammed Sadat, to 30 years in prison in hard labour, for possessing firearm without lawful authority in the Bawku Municipality. Sadat, who broke down in tears after the verdict, was arrested on Tuesday afternoon in Bawku with the illegal weapon concealed on him. The offence, according to Police Prosecutor Sergeant Raphael Azaayitigah, was contrary to Section 192 (i) as substituted by NLCD 398 paragraph (ii), which therefore made the convict liable for the offence. Narrating the story to the court, the prosecutor said on Tuesday December 1, 2009 at about 4:00pm, the police in Bawku had a hint that the convict, Yakubu Mohammed Sadat, was in possession of a locally manufactured revolver pistol around Zongo, a suburb of Bawku. A Police Officer, Detective Lance Corporal Iddi Abdul Razak, was immediately detailed to the area, where he met the convict and effected his arrest immediately. A search on him, according to the prosecutor, revealed that he was really carrying the pistol on him in a polythene bag. Judge William Boampong, in his judgement, said the sentence was to serve as a deterrent to others who had plans of carrying weapons in the Bawku municipality. According to him, the convict�s claim that the locally manufactured pistol was given to him by one Salia, to be given to somebody, without evidence to the police or court, could not be taken as a defence, hence the judgement. Though the judge, William Boampong, described the pistol as nice, to him, possessing it in an area where there was a ban on the possession of arms and other offensive weapons, was illegal and offensive to the law. He ordered that the pistol be destroyed in the presence of the Court Registrar. Sadat, later in an interview with, prior to his departure to start his prison sentence, said he suspected a frame-up by some bad persons in the area to probably get him out of the way. According to him, he had earlier gone to the office of the National Security in Bawku, and promised to help them in getting some criminals in the area arrested and so he suspected that he was set up. �At the moment, I feel very bad and surprised at the speed of the process and even the number of years given me to serve. God knows I�m innocent. I think for a long time to come, I will still be surprised at this judgement and the speed of the trial. If the same was done to other cases, things wouldn�t have gone this far in Bawku,� he lamented. Yakubu Mohammed Sadat, a Wala from the Upper West region, claimed to be asthmatic and a supporter of the National Democratic Congress, residing in the Bawku municipality. He was once a student of the Bawku Senior High School and a striker for the school team. He was a very active NDC member in the Bawku municipality and a boastful one at that. Yakubu was part of those screening persons who were compelled to reapply for absorption into the NYEP after their dismissal when the NDC came to power.