Gloria Akuffo speaking to the press after the court proceedings
The office of Madam Gloria Akuffo, one of the lawyers for the petitioners in the ongoing election petition, has been burgled again.
This is the second time the office has been raided since she took up the case challenging the outcome of the 2012 general elections.
In the first break-in, which occurred somewhere in December 2012, the yet-to-be-identified persons made away with some vital documents and also destroyed some servers in the office.
This time around, the thieves, or whoever they may be, took away two laptops, a hard drive and a memory card in one of the computer processing units in the office.
The unknown suspects were believed to have entered the building through the sliding windows and escaped through the same route as their feet and fingerprints were etched on the furniture in the offices.
Staff of the law firm, Blay and Associates, located in the Pyramid House along the Ring Road Central, reported for work early yesterday morning only to discover that their offices had been broken into.
The intruders also attempted to tamper with the central system of the Close Circuit Television (CCTV) camera installed in the building.
One of the female lawyers of the firm, Nana Yaa Owusu-Aduome, subsequently reported the incident to the police at Nima, who went there to ascertain things for themselves.
A fingerprint expert was later invited from the headquarters of the police Criminal Investigations Department (CID), who took impressions of the fingerprints found on the various items.
The police are yet to review the CCTV to know if it captured images and video footages of the burglars who broke into the building.
Nima District Police Commander, DSP Felicia Oparebea Ayesu, told DAILY GUIDE they had already started investigations into the burglary and taken fingerprint impressions found in the office.
She said they were yet to take the fingerprint impressions of workers in the office and compare them with those found to see if they could match.
Anxiety
Senior partner of the law firm and former Deputy Speaker of Parliament, Freddie Blay, expressed worry when contacted by the paper, saying “they took our hard disk and memory chip and that alarmed us.
“I don’t want to jump to conclusion but I am not happy. I’m a bit worried. It sends my antenna up and we must find an antidote to this. With the earlier theft, I wasn’t too disturbed but now I’m a bit worried. What is it that these people want from us?” he asked.
In view of the fact that the place is not a political office but a law firm, Mr Blay said, “I don’t know what they are even looking for”, refraining from reading any political meanings into the incident.
Another lawyer at Blay and Associates, Eric Osei Mensah, indicated that “it begets belief because we don’t understand why anybody would burgle a law office to begin with and the kind of things that they come in and take, I don’t think a normal thief would take those things, especially with the hard drive, because you may have to dismantle the CPU.”
“So truly, it begets belief; we can’t understand why anybody will do that,” he worriedly said.
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