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“We Fired At Those Who Fired From The Crowd” – Military

General Commanding Officer in charge of Central Command, Brigadier General Joseph Aphour has stated that his team targeted people among the crowd who fired gunshots.
He noted his team exhausted all possible means to ward off the crowd during the Ejura protest, however none of these succeeded.
According to him, the military first gave verbal warnings and then warning shots.
He told the enquiry committee “we started giving verbal warnings, they couldn’t heed to that, we fired warning shots. The time we fired warning shots, we realized that some people were firing within the crowd.”
“It was becoming too bad for us to see civilians firing from the ground. The Commander at that stage then had to use minimum force by trying to fire to maim those people involved.”
“At the instance of our fire, I think the crowd actually redrew and everything came under our control.”
He added that there is the probability that more deaths would have been recorded had they resorted to indiscriminate firing.
“Not for what we did that day, we believe and strongly believe that there would have been more deaths if we actually wanted to use proper force of firing indiscriminately. More would have died but we tried to maim the people, we used the minimum force not to create more problems. And with the minimum force, the the effect was there, the crowd dispersed and we were able to control the situation”, he explained.
A Three Member Committee of Inquiry has been instituted to investigate the the scuffle that took place between security officers and some residents of Ejura-Sekyeredumase which subsequently claimed the lives of two civilians and wounded four others including a teenager on 29th June, 2021.
Source: Opemsuo.com/Hajara Fuseini

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