Ghana’s Assassin of Accra
A serial killer or group of serial killers have been at work in Ghana who may have political connections. In 1999 alone, some 21 women were slaughtered in cold blood in and around the capital Accra. By July 2000, the number had climbed to 25 and, when two murders occurred within a week, thousands of women took to the street in protest. Dressed in black with red armbands, they demanded the resignation of the Minister of the Interior and the Inspector-General of Police.
Angela Dwamena-Aboagye, executive director of the Ark Foundation, an organization that aims to empower women, led the protest after the body of an unidentified young woman wearing a blood-stained skirt and torn underwear was found at Asylum Down, a neighbourhood close to the centre of the city. A condom was found close by.
The previous week the body of a middle-aged woman was found in the same condition in another part of the city. Until then, most of the killing had taken place in Mataheko, a lower middle-class residential area to the southwest of the city. Until then Accra, with a population of just two million, had been considered safe.
The Ghana branch of the Federation of International Women Lawyers (Fida) wrote to the then President Jerry Rawlings and to parliament, asking them to treat the situation as “a national crisis”.
“We wish to state without hesitation that we’re deeply aggrieved, highly disappointed and extremely agitated by this unnecessary and unjustified shedding of innocent blood,” said Elizabeth Owiredu-Gyampoh, President of Fida.
The women protesters said that the situation would have been treated a lot more seriously if the victims had been men.
“As it is, it’s the lives of ordinary people that are being lost so the big men don’t care,” said Angela Dwamena-Aboagye.
The police were also being accused of lacking professionalism. Sylvia Legge, who made the initial report of the most recent killing at a nearby police station, says she was not treated seriously by the police.
“I made the report at 06:30, but the police officer in charge eventually saw me after 10:00, almost four hours later,” she told a local radio station.
But the police claimed that they are starved of resources. The equipment they have for testing blood samples pre-dates World War II.
In July 2000, Charles Ebo Quansah was arrested in the Accra suburb of Adenta for the murder of his girlfriend Joyce Boateng, but he was also charged with the murder of 24-year-old hairdresser Akua Serwaa who was found dead near the Kumasi Sports Stadium in the Ashanti region, 125 miles inland from Accra. He had previous served jail terms for rape.
In custody, he reportedly confessed to the murder of nine other women around Accra and Kumasi, though he was charged with only one. He was found guilty on the basis of a lie-detector test and sentenced to death. However, when he appealed to the High Court, the Commission of Police failed to respond to a subpoena to produce the polygraph machine and, later, denied that the police department had one—though there were hints that a lie- detector test had been administered by “white men” from the FBI. There was also evidence that Quansah had been tortured. Previously, when a list of suspects in the case had been read out in parliament, Quansah’s name was not on it.
Meanwhile the killings continued. In December 2000, a corpse was found in a bush in an uninhabited area off a major road in the south-east of the city bringing the total to 31. The dead woman was in her mid-thirties or early forties. She was lying face-up, naked except for a brassiere. A pair of leggings were lying near by. Police said there were abrasions on her hands, but otherwise there were no signs of struggle. It was thought that she may have been killed elsewhere and her dead body dumped where she was found. Police allowed scores of people to walk past the body, in the hope that someone would identify her. But no one knew her.
On Monday men and women alike called into radio phone-in programmes, alarmed at the sheer frequency of the murders.
“I’m not going to sell
The murders became a political issue and Interior Minister Nii Okaidja Adamafio and his deputy Kweku Bonful were voted out of office. In a TV broadcast, presidential candidate John Kufuor made finding the killer a plank in his 2000 election campaign. Jerry Rawlings had already stepped down and Kufuor won the presidency. However, in 2003, Rawlings alleged that 15 ministers in President John Kufuor’s cabinet had a direct hand in the women’s murders that had now climbed to 34—though the killings had taken place while Rawlings himself was head of state.
Police questioned Rawlings about his claims at his residence in Accra, but the former president refused to name names. He said he will only reveal the names of the ministers involved if the government would invite an independent investigator to administer a lie-detector test on him and those implicated in order minimize the telling of lies in the case.
Ghana’s Inspector General of Police, Nana Owusu-Nsiah, said he was “profoundly disappointed with the utterances and conduct of the former president”. He said that police had conducted thorough investigations over nine years, which eventually led to the arrest and capture of a serial killer, who pleaded guilty to murdering eight of the women. He pointed out, once again, that the Ghana Police Service did not have a lie-detector.
At the time former President Jerry Rawlings made the allegations against leading members of President Kufuor’s ruling New Patriotic Party, he was due to be called to give evidence before Ghana’s National Reconciliation Commission about the alleged torture and murder of members of political opposition during his own period of nearly 20 years in power. Rawlings ruled Ghana for several months after leading a coup in June 1979. He came to power again in a second coup in 1982 and was subsequently elected president in 1992 and 1996. But he chose not to contest the presidential elections of 2000 which brought Kufuor to power.
Charles Ebo Quansah was only ever charged with 11 of the murders and the case against him in nine instances seems flimsy at best. Whether or not they now hold high office, the killers in the other cases are still at large.
Guatemala’s Plague of Death
Guatemala is a paradise for serial killers. In a population of just 15 million, two women are murdered there every day. Even more men are murdered, but the gap is closing fast.
In 2005, 665 women were killed—more than 20 percent up on the previous year. No one really knows why because the crimes are rarely investigated. According to the BBC, not one of those 665 murders has been solved.
The newspapers in the capital Guatemala City carry a regular tally of the number of female corpses found dumped in the streets. But these discoveries are so commonplace that a regular murder barely rates a sentence at the bottom of an inside page. A short paragraph may be given over to the story if the woman had been tortured, trussed naked in barbed wire, scalped, decapitated, dismembered, abandoned on wasteland or, as is common, dumped in empty oil drums that serve as giant rubbish bins. Some reports mention in passing that “death to bitches” or some other insult has been carved into the woman’s flesh. Rarely, though, is there any mention that the woman or girl—sometimes as young as eight or nine—has been raped. According to director of Guatemala City’s central morgue Dr Mario Guerra the majority have.
Little effort is made to identify the victims. They have often been taken far from the place where they were abducted and subjected to unimaginable tortures before being killed. Many are so badly mutilated they are unrecognizable. In Guatemala, there is no fingerprint or DNA database, no crime or victim profiling and no real forensic science. No one investigates and witnesses do not talk. It can take a woman’s family months to trace their daughter to the morgue. Some are never claimed. They are simply designated “XX”, or “identity unknown” and buried in unmarked communal graves.
