TOGOLESE PAEDOPHILE JAILED 20 YEARS (DAILY GRAPHIC, PAGE 3, NOV 13)

THE Tema Circuit Court yesterday sentenced a 45-year-old Togolese to 20 years’ imprisonment with hard labour for defiling two children at Kpone-Kokompe, near Tema.
The accused, Mawuli Amegadzie, is also to be deported back to the Togo after he has finished serving his sentence.
He pleaded guilty to two counts of unnatural carnal knowledge and defilement under the Domestic Violence Law, Act 723, and was sentenced on each count as such. The sentences are to run concurrently.
Prosecuting, Chief Inspector Matilda Tetteh told the court, presided over by Mrs Justice Lorinda Owusu, that the convict and the complainant in the case, Mr Eric Kofi Amankwah, reside in the same vicinity at Kpone-Kokompe.
She said the complainant, who also doubles as the father of the children, aged eight and 11, received reports from a trader who also resides in the neighbourhood of his children’s constant visits to the convict’s residence.
Following earlier information of an alleged defilement case, for which the convict was remanded in police custody last year for a month but was released for lack of evidence, the complainant confronted the children over their association with him, which they denied.
Further interrogation by their father as to their acquisition of new children’s dolls, quantities of candies and other playing materials in their possession led to the younger of the two confessing to receiving them as gifts from the convict after he had sucked their genitals on each occasion.
Chief Inspector Tetteh noted that Mr Amankwah, equipped with the information, lodged a complaint at the Tema regional office of the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (DOVVSU), from where a team, with the help of the Kpone Police, managed to arrest the convict after two hours of resistance, during which he bolted into a nearby bush on seeing the police approaching.
Amegadzie, who looked distressed throughout proceedings, pleaded guilty to the offence, while still holding on to his earlier explanation of his attraction to young boys any time he saw them, following his persistent failure to get an erection around women as a result of a spell cast on him by his stepmother.