A release signed by the Director-General in charge of Public Affairs, Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) Mr David Eklu, and issued in Accra yesterday said the three policemen and the civilian, identified as Ibrahim Tetteh, who allegedly bought the rifle, were currently in police custody, assisting in investigations.

It said the policemen and the civilian would be processed for court without delay and that the AK 47 assault rifle had also been retrieved.

Meanwhile, according to a source at the Anti-Armed Robbery Squad of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) of the Ghana Police Service, the three policemen were on guard duties at Kokrobite and Weija when they were arrested.

Guns assigned

Download and install the Graphic News App for the latest news in Ghana and digital replica's of Graphic Publications

The three policemen were said to have given their guns assigned to them for guard duties to alleged robbers who had planned to embark on a robbery attempt.

A source close to the CID Headquarters told the Daily Graphic that as fate would have it, soon after the policemen had handed over their guns to the robbers for their operations, the robbers got involved in an accident in which they were seriously injured and had to be conveyed to hospital for treatment.

According to the source, an ex-policeman who happened to be at the scene of the accident joined others to rescue the accident victims, not knowing that the victims were suspected armed robbers on a robbery mission.

The ex-policeman put the injured victims in his car, and on the way to hospital, he overheard the accident victims talking among themselves that they had left their guns in the car at the accident scene.

Wrong hands

The suspected armed robbers were worried that if the guns got into wrong hands, the policemen who gave the guns to them would be in serious trouble.

At that point, the ex-policeman realised that he had rescued armed robbers who had got involved in an accident on their way to rob innocent people.

When he reached the hospital, the robbers were quickly rushed to the Out-Patients Department, and while doctors and nurses were attending to them, the ex-policeman sneaked out of the hospital and alerted the police to what he had overheard.

Some policemen were quickly dispatched to the hospital, where they arrested the robbers. Upon interrogation, the robbers admitted that they had hired the guns from the three policemen for their operations.

Policemen

The three policemen were arrested, and when they were questioned, they denied any knowledge of the guns. But when they were asked to return the guns which had been assigned to them for duty, they could not.

However, they were said to have admitted that the guns in question were theirs.