A SUSPECTED armed robber, believed to be a member of a notorious highway robbery gang who operates on the Accra-Tema Motorway, was in the early hours of yesterday shot dead on the motorway, when he engaged a police patrol team in a shoot-out.
Two other members of the gang managed to escape arrest upon seeing the police patrol team before luck, however, eluded the deceased whose lifeless body had been deposited at the Police Hospital morgue in Accra pending autopsy.
According to Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCOP) Maxwell Atingane, at about 4:00 am yesterday, a certain Nimako Amponsah was driving his Chevrolet Matiz salon car from Golf City, a suburb of Tema, towards Accra on the motorway with his brother, Kwaku Boison and two other persons onboard. When they got around the Ashaiman overpass, the vehicle ran out of fuel. So Nimako left behind the other occupants to purchase fuel in town.
He said not quiet long, three unknown robbers emerged from a nearby bush wielding pistols and cutlasses approached the vehicle in an attempt to attack persons on board but they managed to escape.
The Tema Regional Police Commander said �The robbers who searched the vehicle but did not see any valuable thing to rob became annoyed and caused extensive damage to the vehicle.�
DCOP Atingane continued that the robbers broke the front and rear windscreens and also the side glasses of the vehicle with stones. Later the Tema Highway Patrol Team, on their usual patrols on the motorway and other areas, chanced on the robbers.
The robbers, he said, first opened fire upon seeing the security officers and the police also retaliated, killing one while the rest escaped with suspected gunshot wounds.
According to him moves are underway to apprehend the suspects who managed to escape.
The Regional Police Commander appealed to the hospitals and herbal treatment centres in the country not to hesitate to give police information about the suspects, who might visit their healthcare centres with gunshot wounds for treatment so they could be arrested.
He admonished the public to take their personnel security seriously asked for the co-operation of civilians enable the police to apprehend societal miscreants, who were terrorising residents.
<<Print>>