Law Firm Shuts Down As 2 Of It’s Lawyers Die Of Suspected Poisoning

The Bolgatanga office of the law firm Belieb & Belieb LC has closed because two of the lawyers who ran the Upper East regional capital office have died.

Stephen Asuure and Rockson Akugre, both lawyers, died about two weeks apart. Some of their family members think they may have been poisoned.

On September 21, 2022, Stephen Asuure died, and on October 8, 2022, Rockson Akugre also died.

Diana Aburiya Asuure, Stephen Asuure's wife, told The Fourth Estate, "We started to wonder when we noticed that he [Asuure] and Rockson had the same symptoms."


She said that her late husband had problems with his liver, which "spread very quickly." She also said that he got "pale and bloated" before he died.

Mrs. Asuure said that when their illnesses started, their families didn't think anything was wrong until they found out that the two lawyers were sick in the same way.

Mr. Asuure stayed in Bolga while the late Rockson Akugre went to get treatment in Tamale, where his wife lived. He stayed there until he died. They got sick around the same time, spent months in hospitals, and died around the same time. This made their families think that something was up.

They think that whatever poison the two lawyers were exposed to worked slowly, so when the symptoms got bad, they couldn't say for sure when or where they might have been poisoned.

"It could be because of the cases they've worked on. "They may have meant to poison one of them [the two lawyers], but the poison got to the other one," Mrs. Asuure said.

"Without proof, it's hard to figure out who did it," she said.

She said that the family was told that since the illness had been going on for so long and the person who had died had gone to different places and taken different medicines, including herbal medicines, this was why. They were told that an autopsy report on the possible poisoning wouldn't tell them much. She also said that even if they had been poisoned, they didn't know where or who to blame.

She said that someone left a threatening note in their house in early 2022, but they didn't do anything about it because the first investigation didn't show who left it there or why.

She said that the law firm where her late husband had worked was going out of business.

"The law office has shut down. She said, "I went to get my husband's books."

James Marshal Belieb, the head of the law firm, told The Fourth Estate that he had to close the Bolgatanga branch of the firm because it was hard to find lawyers willing to work there. He said that the poisoning rumors were "so common" that they made everyone in the law firm afraid.

He said that he had shut down the business and given the office back to the people who owned it.

He said that he had opened a branch of the firm in Bolga so that the late Rockson Akugre could work there. Later, Mr. Asuure joined Mr. Akugre as a lawyer. The two lawyers had only been working for a year when they got sick. They struggled with their illnesses for months before dying under strange circumstances.

"In the future, we can reopen the firm if I can find a junior lawyer who is willing to go to Bolga," he said.

George Adabre, the uncle of the late Rockson Akugre, told The Fourth Estate that the family had also heard rumors about the possible poisoning, but they had "given everything to God" because they couldn't figure out who was responsible.

In 2021, The Fourth Estate wrote about the Bolga branch of Belieb & Belieb LC and talked to Rockson Akugre about the Bongo Scandal.

The firm's lawyers represented Karim Asumbekere, a businessman whose company was used by the Bongo District Assembly to give a contract to high-ranking assembly officials.

The group then put money into the business's account and went to the Maltaaba Rural Bank in Bongo to take the money out without the business's permission.