Activities of the Ghana Police Service are governed by rules and regulations and that is why interpretations being given to the reason for the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (DOVVSU) handling of a case of human trafficking, instead of the appropriate unit Anti-Human Trafficking Unit, is raising eyebrows.
The situation, if not handled with care, would set a bad precedence to the extent that in the near future, one should not be surprised to hear that personnel of the Visibility Unit are investigating narcotic cases.
The case, which is presently splitting thoughts among the police, involves two persons, Margaret Nabista and Emmanuel Ashatey, who were arrested on November 17 at Kpone for attempting to traffic humans.
The two suspects were arrested by the Tema Regional DOVVSU upon a tipoff that Margaret and her accomplice were preparing to traffic 16 children, made up of 13 girls and 3 boys with ages between 15 and 20 years, to Kuwait and Jordan, in the Middle East.
The children were said to have been recruited from Dambai in the northern part of the Volta Region under the pretext of evangelism.
For 10 days, the youth were kept at Kpone, while Madam Nabista and others were maneuvering to secure their travel documents.
Police Intelligence uncovered the crime and subsequently apprehended the suspects and rescued the youth who were on their way to the Arab world.
DOVVSU at Tema took over the investigation of the case and proceeded to court with it and the suspects were granted bail to reappear at a date in December, this year.
The bone of contention among police personnel is whether DOVVSU is the right unit to handle such a case or the mandated section of the Ghana Police Service, being the Anti-Human Trafficking Unit at the National Police headquarters.
Signals getting to The Enquirer from the police in Accra suggested that Margaret Nabista has been on the radar of the Anti-Human Trafficking.
What this paper gathered is that as a policy guiding the police service, cases are referred to units which are created for specialty; hence human traffic case should have gone to the Anti-Human Trafficking unit instead of the Unit which specializes in domestic violence.
When contacted, highly placed sources at the Police headquarters bemoaned the situation and said that it must not be encouraged for the appropriate units must be allowed to handle specified cases.
The sources said that the Anti-Human Trafficking Unit for instance has the capacity to accommodate and feed the victims until such a time that the investigations are concluded and are made to re-integrate with their respective families.
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