The Chief Executive Officer of the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA), Professor Nana Ama Klutse, has recounted the events leading to the recent accident involving journalists and EPA staff during an anti-galamsey operation near Obuasi in the Ashanti Region.
Professor Klutse revealed that the team’s vehicle got involved in the crash while they were fleeing from a group of heavily built, armed illegal miners.
“As the operation we started yesterday (Wednesday, November 5), it’s a three-week plan that the EPA has, to ensure, especially the services that others provide for mining in our water bodies, which is illegal, we plan to tackle that aspect as well,” she explained.
“So we realised that it is not just enough to say, stop mining in the river bodies, but we saw that we needed to deal with the suppliers.”
She said the operation began with the closure of several shops at Anhwia Nkwanta that supply equipment for illegal mining. On Thursday, the team was heading to another location to continue the exercise when they encountered active galamsey activities near Obuasi.
“On our way near Obuasi, we saw galamsey happening on the ground, so we decided to have a look at what they were doing. When we stopped and walked into the area, as we were getting closer, they were running away, and all of them had left by the time we got there,” she said on TV3 on Thursday, November 6.
“We looked around for what we could pick, and we did pick. While leaving, we saw that there were actually more of the excavators, three, that were inside a river body; they had mined in the river and blocked the river in such a way that it had taken different tributaries around the area and flooded some places. It is messy. It was really a bad situation.”
Professor Klutse said that as they were leaving the scene, the team noticed armed men approaching and had to flee for safety.
“We had the military with us, and the national security also were with us, but then we saw that we couldn’t exchange fire or we could not fight them, so we had to run for our lives. So in the course of running, speeding on the road, we encountered this accident,” she narrated.
According to her, one of the vehicles carrying some EPA staff and journalists collided head-on with a truck transporting pipes suspected to be used for illegal mining.
“Some of the heavily built men were dressed in black with CID written on the back. The soldiers and the national security men asked them for their ID cards, but it became confrontational, and so we had to leave because they said they could not overpower them,” she said.
She added that the EPA team received instructions from Accra to change their route immediately due to security concerns.
“While they were having the confrontation, we got intel from Accra that we should leave immediately, where we were and that even the route we planned to take, we should not use it again… we had to use another route altogether, much longer through the Western Region, the Central Region to Kumasi, but just before we reached Kumasi is when we had the head-on collision,” she explained.
Professor Klutse appealed to health workers attending to the injured journalists and EPA staff to provide them with special care, stressing that they were injured while on national duty.
“We thank God that we all have our lives now, it is just unfortunate that we have some injuries. The most critical one is a broken thigh, which is one of the Joy TV cameramen. Adom TV’s correspondent had a head injury; he is also responding to treatment. Then we have some EPA staff who were also involved in the accident; they are all responding to treatment,” she said.
“We have discussed it with the doctors and nurses in charge to pay special attention to them because we were on a national assignment before this unfortunate incident happened.”
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