3 Soldiers Injured After Attack on Forestry Task-Force at Goaso

Police in the Brong Ahafo Region are on the hunt for about 50 persons suspected to have attacked six military personnel in the Abomire forest reserve at Goaso over the weekend.

The soldiers were part of a forestry task-force against illegal lumbering.

The six officers were attacked with machetes and pepper spray when they arrived for an operation.

“They went there without knowing that these people were armed with pepper spray, cutlasses and other offensive weapons,” the Public Relations Officer of the Brong Ahafo Police Command, Chief Inspector Augustine Kingsley Oppong, told Citi News.

Two of the military men and the driver of the task-force were injured and rushed to the Goaso Government Hospital for treatment.

“When the struggle ensued between them, these youth decided to take the rifles from the soldiers… two soldiers were wounded. The driver of the task-force was also wounded,” he stated.

There has since been reinforcement in the area.

“As of now, police have increased numbers within the township. The military also brought some men to augment the men in the area, and the reports reaching us indicated that those assailants had fled the town,” Chief Inspector Kingsley Oppong noted.

Illegal lumbering is said to have reached alarming levels in the Brong Ahafo Region’s forest reserves in the last year, especially in the Kintampo North, Asutifi North, Tano North and South, and Tain districts.

The practice, coupled with illegal mining in the area, is said to be destroying farmlands and polluting water bodies.