The Criminal Investigations Department (CID) of the Ghana Police Service is investigating the staff of a branch of a major bank in Tema in the Greater Accra Region, where armed robberies have occurred recently, leading to two casualties.
The police are trying to unravel circumstances under which the deadly attacks occurred only after the victims had withdrawn huge sums of money from the same branch of the bank.
Victims in the separate incidents were all accosted by the suspected armed robbers some few meters away from the bank and gunned them down.
One of the latest incidents occurred on February 28, 2018 when a 54-year-old Lebanese, Hajj Ahmad Saffeidine – cashier of Delta Agro Limited, a soap manufacturing company in the Heavy Industrial Area at Tema – was shot dead.
He had gone to the bank to cash GH¢200,000 meant for the payment of the salaries of the company’s workers and other things.
He was reportedly trailed by the robbers from the bank whilst driving his white Toyota Corolla salon car, and was accosted near his company where the money was taken away after killing him.
Prior to that, a 45-year-old scrap agent with Ferro Fabrics – a steel manufacturing company in the Tema Heavy Industrial Area – was also shot in the head by armed robbers in traffic near the Tema Oil Refinery (TOR) on May 8, last year.
The deceased, identified as Wahab Danjuma Mohammed, a resident of Ashaiman, together with his brother, Issahaku Suraj, had also gone to withdraw a huge sum of money from the same bank when the armed robbers, reportedly using an unregistered motorbike, attacked them a few meters from the bank being probed.
The armed robbers, as usual, were said to have trailed Danjuma and his brother from the bank until they closed in on them in traffic and attacked them.
DAILY GUIDE learnt that the spate of robberies in the vicinity impelled the police to descend on the bank and its staff for possible leads.
A deep-throat source told DAILY GUIDE that the police had met with management of the bank to allow staff to assist with investigations.
The police had also demanded Close Circuit Television (CCTV) footages from the bank before interrogating some of the staff as part of the investigation to unravel circumstances under which the robberies occurred.