Bloody Attack At Sea - 20 Fishermen Slashed With Machetes

By Inusa Musah

A vigilante group believed to be members of Fisheries' Watch Committee from Prampram has wreaked multiple knife wounds on twenty fishermen on the high seas at Ada for allegedly engaging in light fishing.The 'hooligans' had reportedly been monitoring their victims who were engaging in the unlawful fishing practice. As a result, when the fishermen went fishing over the last weekend, the vigilante group chased and overpowered them in their different canoes and inflicted multiple cutlass wounds on them.After rendering their victims feeble and reeling in pain, the vigilante group conveyed them (victims) ashore, where they left them to their fate.

The victims came from Tema, Ningo, Wekumagbe, Akplabanya Goi, Lolonya and Anyamam. Joseph Amartey Alimo, leader of the injured fishermen, maintained that their attackers came from Prampram, and that they could identify them.

At a large gathering of fishermen and fishmongers from Tema and Ada East and West at Akplabanya, Ada West District, one of the victims, Francis Akplehey, said the attackers wielded guns, cutlasses, clubs, hammers and other offensive weapons.

But for the intervention of some other fishermen who came to their rescue, Francis said some of his colleagues would have drowned, as they were too weak to paddle their canoes, after the attackers had conveyed some of them ashore.

"Blood profusely oozed from the wounds of some of my colleagues, and so, at a point, I thought they would die before they were brought ashore," he narrated, as some of them showed their bandaged and plastered injuries to the gathering.

Groaning during his narration, Francis Akplehey said the victims could identify their attackers, and entreated the police to investigate the injustice meted out to them.

Try as he could to calm nerves, the wives and fishmongers of the injured fishermen told Joseph Amartey Alimo and the gathering that they would also mount a reprisal attack on their counterparts from Prampram at the Ada-Kasseh market.

Chanting, the women, clad in red and black apparel, vowed to beat their counterparts and make the Kasseh market an unfriendly trade center for the Prampram fishmongers, saying any form of attack on their husbands, equally affects them.

They, thus, dispatched a verbal warning to all fishmongers in Prampram, not to make any attempt at coming to the Kasseh market, since they are bent on carrying out their threat.

Joseph Amartey Alimo, the leader of the injured fishermen, entreated the Minister for Fisheries and Aquaculture to go into the matter and bring the perpetrators to book.

Meanwhile, he told the fishermen that the Ministry and the fishermen's leadership had agreed on an annual three months' ban on fishing, from the coast of Tema to Ada.

The ban, which would be effective April to June, would close the fishing season to allow the sea replenish, and for the fingerlings to grow.

He explained that they opted for the April to June period, because those were the months fishermen recorded little or, sometimes, no catch at all.

Mr. Alimo appealed to the Fisheries Commission and the Minister for Fisheries and Aquaculture not to form any sea vigilante groups to ensure the compliance of the ban, assuring the two bodies that they (fishermen) would form their own task force to ensure adherence to the ban.

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