J.J Yidana, who led 82 Judges Murder probe at NRC on why he was jailed indefinitely by Kojo Tsikata

this chairman i now invite chiefs of lieutenant retired jacob yabuni idana jacob yabuni idana uh you are here to give your evidence to the commission before you do that you have to swear either on the bible across the quran or you cannot fail if you so wish i'll square on the cross you swear on the cross now give out your full name to the commission and say after me pull it back do here but i swear that the evidence that the evidence i shall give you the commission i shall give to the commission shall be the truth shall be the truth the whole truth the whole truth nothing but the truth nothing but the truth don't help me god so help me god as you see in english my lord currently i'm a research officer with the ministry of interior where do you live i live on switchback road block b1 flat 1. you were the police force yes my lord what year did you join the police force i joined the police force in october 1970. now in 1982 what was your position and rank i was chief's president of police how were you assigned special duties in 1982 yes in 1982 i was assigned to investigate a crab brewery the fire outbreak at adebayn and also to investigate the murder of the three her court judges and a retired officer can you tell the commission about the investigation of the three i got judges and the retired army officer in 1982 can you tell them my lord i'll try to be brief because it's a very very um it's it's a quite a long story but i i believe you wrote a book how this is my lord well your book will have a copy so if you can be brief yeah um on the [Music] 1st of july i heard police messages all over the police walker talking that three high court judges had been a retired army officer had been abducted from their homes in the 9th of the 30th of june that's 82. um and this this sort of communication went on for quite some time and then on the 2nd of july the police in accra were assembled and asked to go around and search for these kidnapped persons were to search modern forests and some other buildings we did research we interviewed a few people but we didn't have any clue as to who had the only clue we had was that those people who came wore northern smokes we didn't know where they ascend the victims and we also didn't know who exactly had committed the offense it was not until third of july that was a saturday that a military men who went to for for exercises at a place called bendazi um saw the bodies of three males and a female so they came and reported at the police operations room so i was called to be part of a team that was to go and bring the bodies to a car for identification that was saturday we went to the headquarters and were there millions around it no decision was taken until about somewhere around 10 o'clock so we left as a team were led by one assistant commissioner of police operations mr ahinakwa and we went and brought we couldn't bring the bodies because the bodies were highly decomposed we could see the mag was you know all over the place and we were ill-equipped we didn't have marks we didn't have hand gloves we didn't have ambulances we didn't have the intelligence and so therefore we came back at about 12 midnight and i reported and then we had to prepare to go the next day but i wanted a shortcut but as you say you have a copy of my book you see why i wanted a shortcut that in criminal investigation where you find that there is a dead body and that the carrying the dead body from the sea to another place for postmortem might cause mutilation you can ask the coroner to insult the pathologist to perform the postmortem at the sin of christ and my judgment was that the bodies were highly decomposed but eventually you know force was brought to bear on us to bring the bodies and all principles regarding proper investigations were completely thrown overboard then we brought the bodies on sunday went back there on sunday brought them brought the body to 37 military hospital in the afternoon or sunday and postmortem was performed after the identification of the bodies and then the barrier also took place so we we thought with the atmosphere at that time most of us thought that was the end of the matter but the commissioners yeah they at the time decided to constitute a team of detectives to find out those who did it and why and we had an assigned commission of police who gradually faded out so i remained the head of the investigation so were able to put pieces and pieces of information together and finally arrested the four people who perpetrated the crime america senior teppo and jandu and uh in the course of interrogation i did and mentioned a mata queen then we brought in a matter of gray who also mentioned uh captain call josh carter retired then just at that time the board a board had been set to supervise our work so all our reports went to the special investigations board and at the end of the investigations the board made recommendations but before the board the boy finished his final report i had been arrested so that was i i didn't know the what went on in respect of whether the report was good or was bad now can you tell the commission about your arrest trial at imprisonment here i am on the [Music] 5th of march my lord i was invited to bni and i was given a sermon and i was then very busy with my team preparing the duplicate docket even though the sib had not finished uh his report we were preparing to duplicate docker because commissioner told me that i should get it ready and then the next week send it to attorney general's office so i was invited on the fifth to bni by the national investigation commission committee at that time i didn't know exactly what i had done to be given someone to appear before the national investigations commission i went there and every officer there played some dilly darling game until i realized that nobody was prepared to see me so i walked away then on the 6th of march that was 1983. i was invited to the police operations room in the afternoon and i went there i met the damn igp kublenu i met as asijima i met captain kusi and i was out to wait outside so i sat on the chair outside then after about 15 minutes as i said jimmy and captain cruzi came out and said we were going for an operation the operation landed at at bnr headquarters where i was told that i was not a guru i was to be interrogated that i assisted somebody to escape from this country and that was that and i was interrogated after three days and on the systems of march i was charged with harboring a criminal who was the alleged criminal captain korra now did you in fact how about captain korra i did not but how did it come about that your child was searching my lord the certain circumstances had been created i got to know that captain korra had come to my house sometime in november 82 after my arrest then i was asking the other people how it was that we have been narrated elijah muni particularly and he said captain kura came around there and said he was from tamale and he was on his way to kumasi and was looking for his brother and the brother was at tessano so allaji mumuni said he was going home to come and pick him to test anu but unfortunately he couldn't come back so the next day he came and picked him and sent him to his brother's house and went away and because i will have to make one point clear why i wasn't in the house on the 7th of january after the coup i was invited by rollins himself to wander barracks and it appeared our discussion didn't even end on that day he invited me again on the 26th of january and we were having some disagreements over certain issues so i decided there for security reason and i also realized that they were keeping my house under watch and it was probably not wise for me to stay in the house that anything could happen so i wasn't sleeping in the house so maybe if i had met him or had seen him i would have been able to say exactly what happened i would have told the interrogators that yes the man came to my house and left or i saw him and i he left but i would not have denied that i didn't harbor him i wasn't there so when you were charged you were tried by the tribunal yeah i was tried by one of the national public tribunals were you convicted i was convicted how many years to eight years ihl did you appeal against the sentence the pngc law 24 under which we were convicted did not give her the right to appeal and even when the pianist lost 78 repealed lord 24 we were excluded those who were tried before they said those who were tried before december 1984 or in 1983 had no right of appeal what the 78 provided for was that we could petition the pngc and our lawyer came and promised to do that that was the late kutadangkwa he promised to do that on our behalf but we don't know whether he did it or not so at the time how many children did you have i had five children how old was the youngest the youngest was about 10. now did you spend the whole eight years in prison yeah i i spent more than eight years and the explanation is this that the when you are given a sentence of say eight years you have a one-tailed remission uh previously this federal remission was meant to be a period of probation for a prisoner but now it looks like the one third is a gift but every prisoner who behaves well ends it if you misbehave or you contravene any regulation in the prison you are charged and tried and there are also regulations which specify what type of offenses you can commit and then you have your part of your remission forfeited or hold the whole of it so when i went in when we were convicted in august that was 19th august our sentences were validated to march so it meant that by the 7th of july 1988 i was due to be released because if i that is if i behave properly but on the 6th of july 1988 i was invited by the um as son director of prisons in charge of in salon prison and told me that he who told me that he had received a letter from accra that i was to be kept in prison until further notice because i was a threat to national security did you see the letter i didn't see the letter did you let her get to know who signed the letter well it was when i came back from holland in 2001 i got to know that it was captain kojo chikata who signed the letter and this captain kojitikata he was named in your investigation yeah he was now what do you have to tell the commission um as contained in my petition i want the commission to be able to find out what real reasons captain kuduchata had to bring up such a letter and i stayed back in prison for another a little under four years and it was during this time my first child died and i think that was a period of very traumatic events whilst i was in prison and i wanted to the committee i was craving the intelligence of the commission for commission to look into the circumstances that led to my detention and whatever the commission can recommend for me in terms of compensation but again the my experiences in prison and i put i'm putting that in a second book um is that it looks like ghanaians have not been determined enough to defend democracy why i'm saying so is this that at that time it was just the a few people who held everybody under bondage and did what they liked but you can still see signs of those things rippling all around and when i observe what we are doing now i am reminded of this a statement of john kennedy when he visited germany and he advised the east germans to break down the wall and they said no and he told them that freedom has its difficulties freedom democracy itself is not perfect but it doesn't mean that we should build a wall and keep our people inside they look like we since have sections of our society who are not determined to defend democracy they still think that they can keep everybody and their body and do whatever they like and i think it appears a lot of people do not learn from history that's why the historians say he treated this man that man does not learn from history and if we are learning from history even the trials of nuremberg were just enough to teach in the healings that democracy is better than dictatorship because whatever you do today will catch up with you tomorrow the other thing is the perpetrators what has been bothering me is that there is not one perpetrator who has come rather to call the victim to apologize a perpetrator to come and say that on such and such a day at such a second time i did this to this person so i'm asking the commission to invite the man for me to apologize to him for what happened then it then appears that the perpetrators are withdrawing into their share which is very bad for national development because when you do that you are still going into yourself to make rules to deal with the situation and there will have a lot of problems with that and the perpetrators and willingness to come and just give up just see what happens if we don't have them doing this then we are going to have a lot of problem on our hand in terms of security reformation my book is basically only for a reformation of prisoners and i think what society is doing now is to dodge the question we talk of improving conditions in the prisons for prisoners because they are human beings but we don't think about our rule reformation starts from the prison and it ends in society but let's say if a prisoner comes out of seeing someone prison where he hasn't been paying any rent he doesn't buy food he doesn't pay for electricity and he comes out and the society rejects him because he's a convict he's a criminal he's not to be employed nobody wants to associate with him if he goes back to sleep at the bus stations and he picks bits and bits of food from refuge dams now where else does he go he has to go back there and i'm saying that because in about 1988 89 with the assistance of kwame pianim we trained a number of prisoners to become class 3 referees because we were promoting football in the prison yard and then we told the prison officers that when these people are being discharged you should give them letters to go to sports council because they were men of substance we didn't think they were those riff raffs or those who formed part of what we call the revolving door population of the prison but they were men we thought we knew that if they came out and they were gainfully employed and they were looked after they would stay out of prison and we did this but nobody followed up it is because society attitude is very negative towards the prisoner and it is all because when i came out because i wasn't pardoned nobody would employ me that was what happened i was just a criminal you know so we need to change our attitude if we think reformation has to take effect in the life of somebody who has gone to jail it is not only the prison the prison as it is sometimes might probably succeed in doing one third of this reform the two things remains within society the house society that we have to accept them and rehabilitate them so i think that these are the points i want to talk to for thee thank you very much sharing those deep thoughts with us i hope my other colleagues may comment on some of the suggestions that you made but now i i want to go back to a statement you just made almost casually in your earlier presentation and you say that the person who was in charge of the investigating team faded out why did this man fade out it's unfortunate he is no more but from what i reduced from his behavior it appeared he knew more than we knew and he didn't want to get into trouble so when it came to us in interrogating the people he would say oh i've been given an assignment by commissioner c id i've been given an appointment i mean assignment by the igp so you go ahead and then gradually he was no longer part of us but i suspect or suspected at that time that he knew more than we knew so he advised himself now my second question is about the fate of those colleagues you worked with in that investigation team because you know it can lead us to make some assumptions um what use of it you uh can you say that it it happened to your other colleagues who constituted the investigation team yeah a few uh inspected aku was i was inaudible even a waiting trial was arrested and place in a castle guard room there was an attempt to arrest ohinansa who was my gpt he ran away and to escape to togo and now he's living in britain asp o'drew was also arrested he escaped from prison during the june 19 events he's now living in in holland and musa my corporal he was also arrested and kept in air force guard room at the time i was arrested so the bulk of my team i said they were the few good men but now they are men with broken hearts well thank you very much that was quite revealing i thank you for the additional information good to have you here again let me see how much we appreciate your support for the work of this commission you've talked briefly on the um letter of the three judges and the the retired amios well this it's a very major issue which i'm sure will be seized with for some time um but and again thank you very much for your for your book i'm sure it's a tremendous education for all of us and every ghanaian appreciates the contribution that you make him it's all towards the the process of our democracy which we are fighting for um you've just mentioned the need to fight to fight for it and i think it's something that we have to do if really eventually we have to have the two topics in this country and you've started already anyway which is an inspiration to all of us thank you very much um the talking of here you becoming a danger to national security because of harboring this chart cora who was he kura was a lieutenant at the model regiment at uh who and it was alleged that he was involved in the it was between the terror we don't create or we don't allow such situation ever to happen again i think that's something that we all have to to fight for the reformation of prisoners and information of prisons it's a very important point that we've made certain things have happened in prison we've heard of you know witnesses coming here and telling their gory stories about and i think something that we have to to see how best to to turn them around people in prison detainees or you know whoever criminal should come out as reform people so that they can be more useful members of the of the society um i'm waiting to read your is it your second book which you mentioned here's my lord i i hope it will come up come out very shortly but jacob may ask what are you doing now i'm a research officer with minister of interior i see well thank you very much today and thanks for coming um have you had this expression before happy are those who dream dreams and are ready to pay the price to make them come true i've heard that my lord keep it in the back of your mind there are many people like that in this country they have dreams of a better ghana and are ready to pay the price for it thank you broken-hearted what do you think we can do to bring some type of solace to them i think if i may as a commission if they could be rehabilitated in the in form of in the form of some compensation i don't think it would have been a move in the wrong direction it would have also motivated others as as i've always been saying maybe there were other policemen in the system who could have done a better job than we did but if the tax fell on us and we did our best and the nation has appreciated it and i think the nation must show some appreciation of what we did and why we suffered so i am humbly asking the commission if you could make some recommendation for members of my team to be rehabilitated living in europe is not easy i personally lived in europe for six years when i came out of prison in 1990 in 1995 i was arrested again and when i was granted bill amnesia got me out to holland and it is not easy to stay there and so they are there they want to come but when they come back from where do they start there's a question facing muslim ohina is there my book has even become a source of income for his brother who couldn't get in the job at all after he left the police service and audrey is in holland he wants to come home edmond is in london he wants to come home but where does he start from i've come home just lucky to be giving some small place to patch on i don't have a house they don't have houses when they come where do they live so there's a problem facing members of my team and i think i humbly respectfully request the commission to make some recommendations so that they could be rehabilitated and i think that would have been also a motivating force that those work who are coming after us if a thing like this happens they can say oh this was what happened these people did that and that was how they were rewarded and i'm going to do it to be rewarded but if this is not done i'm afraid if we don't hope to face a situation like that but you know we can never tell okay thank you very much indeed idana thank you very much for coming and thank you very much also for your book i just want you

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Length: 33min 39sec (2019 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 17 2020