A baker who claimed she was wrongfully jailed and currently “wasting away” in the condemned cells of the Nsawam Medium Security Prison, is pleading with Ghanaians to support her appeal her sentence.
Madam Salamatu was charged for murdering her husband.
Narrating how she ended up in the condemned cells during an interaction with Crime Check Foundation’s Ibrahim Oppong Kwarteng, Salamatu said she was charged for abetment to commit murder.
She insists she is innocent and had no hand in her late husband's death.
According to her, her late husband was found unconscious in his room by their younger daughter with blood oozing from his head and upon rushing him to the hospital, he was pronounced dead.
Following the demise of her husband, she was later picked by the police together with some unknown men and accused of hiring the services of assailants to kill her husband.
Aggrieved Salamatu said she was also accused of infidelity, which according to the police motivated her to murder her husband.
“The police called me a prostitute. They accused me of dating a Whiteman who has secured passport and visa for me to travel out of the country that’s why I killed my husband. Meanwhile I have never applied for passport or visa,” she recalled.
Based on the aforementioned allegations, she was remanded to allow investigations into the case by one Chief Inspector Awuni, and the findings taken to the Osu Magistrate Court where the judge in charge, Justice Aboagye Tano declared the results as mere allegations without merit.
The case was later transferred to an Accra High Court for further probe and a post-mortem was conducted on the body.
“Later when the post-mortem result was released, I was accused of poisoning my late husband. The Cuban doctor who conducted the first post-mortem was reported dead and a different doctor from the Police Hospital conducted a second one.”
She recounts the emotional torture she was subjected to when Inspector Awuni took her to the graveside of her late husband, exhumed the body, dissected it in front of her and took out his intestines for another post-mortem.
“He was buried three weeks but God gave me the strength to watch them exhume the corpse and take out the intestines for post-mortem. I was deeply sad and wept,” she noted.
Even though the second post-mortem results confirmed her late husband died out of “Shock”, Salamatu said, the prosecutor in charge of the case argued that because she was not willing to talk to the police, the court must give her a stiffer punishment, hence she been charged for murder.
“The prosecutor, Sefakor Gbatse said I didn’t want to communicate with them because I knew why I killed my husband. Meanwhile, all the allegations levelled against me that I have a Whiteman and the food poisoning were all proved false. But because she kept insisting, the judge decided to give me same sentence as the other suspects.”
“If I get appeal I’ll pursue it but where will I get the money for that? Even the lawyer who handled the case I haven’t heard from him,” she pleads.
