Ritual Killings Of Disabled Ghanaian Children Accused Of Being Possessed By Evil Spirits.

INTERNATIONAL TELEVISION network, Al Jazeera, is broadcasting to a global audience a video footage of ritual killings of disabled Ghanaian children accused of being possessed by evil spirits.

The killings, currently happening at Bolgatanga in the Upper East Region and some parts of the Northern Region, were uncovered mid last year by Anas Aremeyaw Anas, a Ghanaian journalist.

The footage has generated an international condemnation of the killings and five suspects are currently in the grips of the Upper East Regional Police Command, being investigated for infanticide.

Most of the murdered children were physically-challenged and were born to parents who believed the children portended misfortune.

The parents therefore contracted community elders known as ‘concoction men’ who murdered the children for a fee.

“Thousands of such children have been killed in Ghana because the communities they were born into believe they are evil spirits and many more continue to get killed on the quiet and the fact that I have gone undercover to cause the arrest of a handful of such killers does not mean the practice has ceased” 

DCOP Bright Oduro, the Upper East Regional Police Commander, as at the time the investigations were done, explained during the Al Jazeera broadcast why the murder of children had been allowed to go on for years without arrest: “It is a very difficult thing to do.

It’s unfortunate, we have no idea why this is happening, who is behind this and why they have not been arrested.”

“During the three weeks that I worked on this story, I came across 10 men who were willing to kill a baby for spiritual reasons…the practice’s continued existence is a result of the impunity enjoyed by those involved and the fact that the police have never acted in any way to prevent these children being killed is surely a strong incentive for the concoction men to continue their business as usual,” Anas noted.

Anas, an award-winning journalist, said he presented an 18-month-old baby to the concoction men and told them his business had never seen prosperity after the birth of the child.

The concoction men, after some spiritual consultations with ‘divinity,’ then told him that the child was the source of his misfortunes and therefore should be killed through a specially brewed poison.

He said the killers charged him an equivalent of $40, three live fowls and some bottles of hard liquor after which an appointment was fixed for them to come to his home and feed the child with the concoction.

“I had contracted a London-based company to produce a prosthetic baby in the exact replica of the 18-month-old child because I was not very sure what might happen.

When they came, they saw the real child but after they had prepared the poison and were about to kill the innocent boy, I swapped it with the prosthetic baby and that was when the Police swooped in and took over.

Every single thing was being recorded secretly and the Police were in a separate room, monitoring everything on CCTV.”

follow link to watch video: