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Inspector General of Police James Oppong Boanuh called to action
The Ghana Journalists Association (GJA) requires the Ghana Police Service to investigate, arrest and prosecute as quickly and decisively as possible anyone behind death threats to the independent investigative journalist, Manasseh Azure Awuni.
Manasseh says he received the threat, the latest in what has become a virtual routine, by email on Christmas Day in which the perpetrator notifies that he will be removed and that he was “lucky to keep walking as a free man.”
The insipid handwriting warns in part; “Let me tell you Manasseh or whatever your name is, we good citizens of Ghana will not sit around and wait for a few bad guys like you to destroy that beautiful country. If the condition demands that we eliminate rats like you, we will not give up our oars to do exactly that.
“We are monitoring the current situation in the country very closely, and when it gets out of control, we will act quickly to make sure we eliminate them to put a final character on this uproar that is happening.”
The threat comes a day after Manasseh published an op-ed on the recent general elections in Ghana.
In a statement issued by the GJA and signed by its secretary general, Edmund Kofi Yeboah, the coordinating body for journalists asks the police to provide adequate security for Manasseh and other journalists across the country who have also received death threats.
The GJA also called on President Nana Akufo-Addo as the “Commander-in-Chief of the Ghanaian Armed Forces, to condemn the death threats against journalists and to give a strong guarantee of their safety.”
The GJA also called on the National Peace Council, political parties, civil society organizations, religious organizations, and all well-meaning Ghanaians to roundly condemn the death threats issued against Manasseh and other journalists in the country, describing the threat of death as a “barbaric contemplation, scheme, orchestration, plot and plan, whether of individual inspiration or collective conspiracy, to assassinate a journalist for fulfilling a legal mandate guaranteed by the Constitution of the Republic of Ghana of 1992.”
The association said: “Given the growing lack of tolerance in our body politic and the inclination of some people to resort to brutality especially against journalists; given the reference to the gruesome murder of Ahmed Suale committed by the threatening or to inform Manasseh about the fate that awaits him every time he picks up his pen to write, and given the fact that the evil person launched the death threat against Manasseh the Christmas Day, a day that marks the celebration of the life of Jesus Christ, the Savior, and in which the good will of humanity abounds, this barbarous act of intent must be condemned to death by reaching the bottom and dealing with the guilty with decision. “
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