It was late Wednesday, June 1982, and High Court judge, Justice Kwadwo Agyei Agyepong was having his supper while his son Kwabena Agyei Agyepong who had just returned from watching a local game between Accra Hearts of Oak and Cornerstone was writing a letter.
A knock was suddenly heard on their door and the supposed visitor informed Justice Kwadwo Agyei Agyepong that his colleague Justice, Cecelia Koranteng had fallen ill and rushed to the Ridge Hospital.
With that information, Justice Kwadwo Agyei Agyepong ordered his housemaid to fetch his slippers and left home with the words “I will be back soon’.
These words turned out to be the last words of the renowned judge to his family as he was later found to have been murdered alongside two other High Court justices who were presiding over cases that were of interest to the leadership of the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) regime.
Four days after Justice Kwadwo Agyei Agyepong left home, his family and the two high court justices found out through information from a cattle herdsman that their beloved had been murdered and burnt at the Bundase Military Training.
“It was Wednesday evening and I had just arrived home from watching a game between Hearts of Oak and Corner. Because of the coup, there was a curfew so we slept until around 8pm. He was eating and I was writing a letter. His chamber was close to Justice Koranteng Addo as the Supreme Court. Someone came to inform him that Cecelia Koranteng Addo was sick and being sent to Ridge Hospital so they needed my father. His last words to me were that I will be back soon.
“We went to sleep thinking that the situation had become severe so he didn’t return in the night. The following day, the wife of our next-door neighbor who was Justice Poku Sarkodie came to our place to inform my father that soldiers came to pick up her husband. So I went upstairs to look for my father but he was not around. It took another four days for us to find out he was killed. Those four days were the worst days of my life. We kept looking for him until we found out that he was killed with other ages.”
“On Sunday, I went to the stadium to watch another match. It was a WAFU that Hasaacas was playing. Upon returning home after the game, I saw a lot of people who had gathered at our house, beckoning to hurry up and come home. It had been communicated to them that the bodies had been found at Bundase. The military range around Afienya.”
A common narrative that often follows the story about The Martyrs of the Law is that Justice Cecelia Koranteng was a nursing mother.
However, Kwabena Agyepong has clarified the story, stating that it was his mother rather who was nursing a baby.
“It is a myth. It was my mother rather who just gave birth to our last born who was just three months,” he told Deloris Frimpong Manso in the latest edition of the Delay Show.
