Police, two civilians assisted me to escape, Suspected kidnapper tells court

Samuel Udoetuk Wills, the 28-year-old man suspected to be involved in the kidnapping of three girls in the Western Region, has told the Takoradi District Court that an officer in the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) aided him to escape from police custody.

According to him, the CID officer, together with his two friends, whose names he gave as Kwesi and John, assisted him to break ‘jail’ on December 30, 2018.

When the presiding magistrate, Mr Michael Kudjo Ampadu, asked of the name of the supposed CID officer, Wills said he did not know his name but could identify him during an identification parade.

Wills is before the court on charges of escaping from lawful custody, causing unlawful damage to a police facility and resisting arrest, to all of which he had pleaded not guilty.
Hearing continues on February 28, 2019.

Escape

Following a series of kidnapping incidents involving teenage girls in the Takoradi metropolis, Wills was arrested at Kansawurodo, a suburb of Sekondi/Takoradi, on December 22, 2018 on suspicion of being part of a kidnapping syndicate.

He was charged with kidnapping and remanded in police custody by the Takoradi Circuit Court on December 24, 2018 to reappear before the court on January 29, 2019 for the commencement of his trial.

But on December 30, 2018, he escaped from police cells through the ventilation windows of the cell after using a hacksaw blade to cut the iron rods used to secure the windows.

As a result of Wills’s escape, seven policemen from the Takoradi Metropolitan Police Command under whose watch the suspected kidnapper escaped were interdicted and given the standard police 10-day ultimatum to rearrest the suspect or face disciplinary action.

On January 3, 2019, the police rearrested him in an uncompleted building at Kansawurodo.