Armed soldiers assault Wa residents in search of missing mobile phone

• A viral of armed military officers brutalising residents of Wa

• The officers were searching for a missing phone which belongs to one of them

• Several victims sustained various degrees of injury

Some armed soldiers have been caught on camera brutalising residents of Wa in the Upper West Region on Thursday, July

Read full article1, over a missing mobile phone supposedly belonging to one of the soldiers.

According to one eyewitness, one of the soldiers is believed to have boarded what is referred to as “Yellow Yellow” or “Mahama Cambo” and lost his phone.

The incident is said to have started at 1:00 pm and lasted for close to an hour at the Wa main traffic.

Several of the victims are said to have sustained various degrees of injury.

Two of them are currently on admission at the Wa Municipal Hospital.

A 29-year-old vulcanizer, who was a victim, is suspected to have developed a fracture in his right thigh during the assault.

This comes after soldiers opened fire on protesters at Ejura in the Ashanti Region, leading to the death of two people and four others injured.

The Public Relations Officer of the Upper West Regional Coordinating Council, Cletus Awuni, who was also a victim, told an Accra based Citi FM that, the soldiers dragged him out of a car and interrogated him for filming the incident.

Awuni explained: “I got a call that the military personnel was brutalising 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.”

Watch how the residents were assaulted in the video below.