Stop the marauders!

The pictures on page 15 of this edition of the paper are scary. AK 47 assault rifles and other gadgets of the underworld, as they stare at you, speak volumes about what ordeal victims of the attacks of armed robbers suffered when the latter descended upon them in the wee hours of the night.

For those who have never come close to armed robbery attacks, reports about such ordeals are only imagined, too distant to be of concern to them. Armed robberies and the fatalities which originate from them are real.

It can only be imagined the number of persons who have died at the hands of these heartless persons for whom the end of dispossessing people of their belongings justifies the means.

Kumasi, the Ashanti Regional capital, has suffered enormously from the nefarious and deadly activities of hoodlums in recent times. Indeed, the Police Administration had cause to assure residents of the Garden City not to despair as they would do all that was needed to protect them.

Much as the assurance was soothing, it did not scare the killers away from prowling in the neighbourhoods and even filling stations: our security managers, it would appear, must revise their notes about how to reverse the trend.

Although Kumasi has been in the news of late, it is by no means the only place where armed robbery is on the ascendancy.

. It is instructive that the weapons seized by the police are foreign firearms – none of them locally manufactured. It would be interesting to find out how such firearms for which no licence would neither be issued by the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) nor the Interior Ministry came into the country.

We recall how even more sophisticated weapons were seized by the police in Kumasi in the early days of this year or so, including anti-aircraft rounds. We are disturbed about the tendency of armed robbers to arm themselves with such sophisticated weaponry.

We are excited that those suspected to be behind the recent spate of deaths in Kumasi have been nabbed, from whom invaluable information would be gleaned. Such trove of information should go a long way in providing the law enforcement agency with the necessary details about the movements of armed robbers.

The needless deaths at the hands of criminals should be stopped. We are longing for the days when Ghana was devoid of such heightened level of robberies.

The impunity of the robbers should not be allowed to continue. We trust that with the necessary intelligence the days of armed robberies would be numbered. And what better way to achieve this ultimate goal than when members of the public are forthcoming with the necessary information to the police.

The arrest of the four suspects as shown on page 15 in this edition is obviously the result of intelligence. When we fold our arms and expect the police to do it all alone, little or nothing would be achieved and the hoodlums would unfortunately rule the nights.

Work on the stoppage or even reduction of the spread of small arms should be upped because without such firearms hoodlums would be really reduced to nothingness, posing no longer a danger to anyone.