Thursday, 28th March 2024
To guardian.ng
Search

Ghana jails man who confesses plan to kill President Mahama

By Guardian Nigeria
28 July 2015   |   4:05 pm
A high court in the Ghanaian capital Accra sentenced a man to a 10-year prisonment term Tuesday after he confessed to having planned to kill President John Dramani Mahama. Security agents on Sunday arrested 36-year-old Charles Antwi in possession of a pistol while inside a church usually attended by Mahama and his family. The Mahama…

jail-loyarburokA high court in the Ghanaian capital Accra sentenced a man to a 10-year prisonment term Tuesday after he confessed to having planned to kill President John Dramani Mahama.

Security agents on Sunday arrested 36-year-old Charles Antwi in possession of a pistol while inside a church usually attended by Mahama and his family.

The Mahama family was absent when the incident occurred, an official statement had said on Sunday.

“I wanted to kill President Mahama to take over his position,” he told the court in Accra.

“Trying to kill the president was a way of fighting for the nation. I was to be sworn in as president when president John Evans Atta Mills died,” in July 2012 Antwi told the court.

Antwi’s explanation struck observers as bizarre, because he is virtually unknown to the public and had no record in national or presidential politics. His description of locating the church was similarly curious.

“A military personnel at the Osu Castle (the presidency) directed me to the president’s church at Ringway,” he also told the court session, attended by an AFP journalist.

He did not disclose the identity of the military official.

Antwi told the court that the gun was given to him by a Burkinabe citizen he also did not name.

The man was arrested after his “fidgety and suspicious behaviour was noticed” during the Ringway branch of Assemblies of God church’s morning service, a government spokesman, Edward Omane Boamah, had said in the official statement.

The mental state of health of the convict is unknown.

The judge imposed the maximum sentence allowed by the law on Antwi for illegal possession of weapons.

0 Comments