Cable thief jailed 13 years in Cape Coast
The court convicted him on his own guilty plea.
The Cape Coast Circuit Court presided over by Justice Dorinda Smith Arthur has sentenced a 28-year-old fisherman to 13 years in prison for stealing feeder cables worth GHS25,000 belonging to the telecommunications network, MTN, at Pershie in Elmina.
The convict is Kojo Nkrumah, alias Joe who is a stowaway but has been deported. According to the prosecution, he illegally entered the fenced MTN cell site to steal the cables.
The court convicted him on his own guilty plea.
Reports from the Daily Graphic indicate that according to the Prosecution, the complainants were a supervisor of ICK International Services Limited, Mr. Ishmael Ashitey, and a telecom engineer of MTN, Mr. James Beke.
According to the prosecutor, there had been series of feeder cable theft the Elmina District Command was investigating.
On May 25 this year at about 5:22 am, a distress call was placed to the complainants by their company that a thief had been arrested at their cell site at Pershie near Elmina.
Having received this information, the complainant, in the company of a Fred Nomafo, a witness to the case visited Cell Site Four. When they arrived, they discovered the convict had been tied against the MTN cell site fence metal and was about to be lynched by the townsfolk.
From the initial inquiries that were made, it was discovered that the convict visited the site under pretenses of having been contracted as an engineer.
The Daily Graphic further reports that the prosecutor told the court that “A witness who suspected Nkrumah to be a thief shouted for help but he escaped and returned around 5:10 a.m. to cut the cables,”
Nkrumah was subsequently arrested. After admitting the offense, he was arraigned at the circuit court.
