A viral video on social media on Thursday, July 1, 2021, shows armed military officers brutalizing some residents in the streets of Wa, the Upper West Regional capital, allegedly over a missing mobile phone.
Some eyewitnesses said the soldiers claimed they were searching for their stolen mobile phone.
They recounted how the officers who could not be immediately identified, stopped tricycles and brutalized particularly young men.
The Public Relations Officer of the Upper West Regional Coordinating Council, Cletus Awuni was also beaten by the officers.
“They hit my head about three times and my back, because they used the taser on my hands and my chest,” Awuni said in a radio interview with Accra based Citi FM.
In detailing his account of the incident, Mr. Awuni said, “This afternoon I got a call that the military personnel was brutalizing people in town. We saw that they were beating everybody. In the process of inquiring why people were being beaten, I was also beaten.”
“I called the Military Commander to find out what was happening, and he said he didn’t know anything about what they were doing, so the Commander said he wanted to call the 2nd in command. As we were speaking, people were being beaten, so I decided to take a video and send it to the commander, so he sees what the boys are doing. They saw that I was filming them, and they asked why I was filming them. I said I was on a phone call with their commander, then they started beating me up.”
“They demanded that I deleted the video, and I told them I won’t delete it. They started using the taser on me to delete the video.”
“It took the intervention of one police DSP to shout at them that they are beating the PRO of the Upper West Regional Coordinating Council before they stopped beating me… They gave my phone back to me, and I was driven to the hospital by my driver,” he explained.
Another victim, a pupil teacher, told Citi FM that he was accosted in front of his shop in town and was beaten by the officers.
