The Upper East Regional Minister, Stephen Yakubu, has warned that armed robbers have devised an alternative way of unleashing attacks on road users.
According to him, they now lie in wait inside a bushy border of a road and when a person travelling by car approaches, the armed gangsters drive herds of cattle from the bush into the roadway.
The driver would be compelled to slow down for the livestock to cross over. Whilst the foot of the unsuspecting motorist is resting on the brake pedal for the crossing cattle, the bandits would seize the moment and emerge from the bush and strike their target.
“The armed robbers are now using different tricks. For example, they will bring the cows to block the road as if they are crossing. If the cows are on the road, you can do nothing; you have to stop. It’s a new trick they are deploying and we have taken a decision as to what to do about that,” the Chairman of the Regional Security Council said in a Starr News interview.
The minister also spoke of plans to put up more police stations, beef up security patrol operations, and enhance the government’s database management system on new faces found in the region.
“We’ve also realised that sometimes the criminals don’t actually live in the region. They come to the region, commit the crime and go back. We are enhancing our database because some of these guys might have committed crimes before and so if we have a very good database, we can trace them.
“And you can also see that we are having problems with our lighting system also. And in fact, we’ve realised that in some of the streetlights, people actually cut off their wires just to make sure that Bolgatanga (the region’s capital) is dark. You would not believe this. But I don’t know why people would do things like this― either they want to perpetrate a crime or its politics, you really don’t know,” he stated.
