It is only in rare occasions that a prisoner is jailed for another four years after escaping from prison without his clothes on.
A man named Fataw Abdella was given a four-year term with hard labour by the Tarkwa Circuit Court after he fled from lawful prison custody while naked.
Abdella pleaded guilty, but he begged the presiding judge, Mrs. Hathia Ama Manu, to be lenient because a fellow inmate had misled him.
But the judge told Abdella that the point of punishment was to protect the nation and discourage repeat offenders like him.
Superintendent Bright Gbogbo was the second-in-command at the Tarkwa Local Prison, according to Chief Inspector Joseph Lartey, the prosecutor. Abdella was a remand prisoner in a robbery case, Lartey said.
Inmate use of the bathhouse in the jail yard, he said, was unprotected beyond a skeleton of razor-wire mesh wrapped around wooden bars fastened to the walls.
In an attempt to escape from prison, Abdella climbed over razor wire mesh and leaped over prison walls while fully clothed on December 1, 2023, at approximately 1430 hours.
According to Chief Inspector Lartey, a group of prison guards noticed Abdella and alerted their colleagues and the public to the situation by setting off the emergency siren.
According to him, Abdella attempted to escape by going through the railway quarters and the Cyanide neighbourhood before reaching the Tarkwa Banso road. However, a jail officer and a cab driver apprehended Abdella and returned him to the prison yard.
As the prosecutor put it, “Abdella led them to the crime scene and demonstrated how he scaled down the wall” during the investigation after the event was reported to the police.
The same court would soon see Abdella on trial for a prior robbery charge.
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