Police intervention prevents destruction of school properties

The Police have said an intervention they made has prevented the destruction of school properties in high schools.

“In pursuit of our proactive prevention policing strategy the Police initiated engagements with final year students and school authorities at most of the senior high schools in the country,” a statement said on Monday October 11.

This comes at a time the Ghana Education Service (GES) has asked the security agencies to expedite investigations into the alleged burning of the Nyinahin Catholic Senior High School in the Ashanti region by final year students of the school.

The five-room dormitory block of the school was gutted by fire.

The incident which recorded no casualty happened last Thursday, the Police said.

The Ashanti Regional Public Relations Officer (PRO) of the Ghana National Fire Service (GNFS) DO III Desmond Ackah, told journalists that “We had a distress call at 9:30 pm last night that there was a fire outbreak at Nhyinahin Catholic Senior High School. So we quickly dispatched the Nhyinahin fire tender to the school, and it took us about five minutes to get there.”

“Upon arrival, we realized that fire has engulfed the boys’ dormitory block A and the fire was all over and spreading widely and very fast in all the six rooms in that particular block, and in order to prevent the fire from the further spread, we defensively and offensively tackled the fire, and we brought it under control at exactly 11:27 pm, and then eventually succeeded in dousing the fire completely at exactly 12:23 pm.”

Speaking on this matter in an interview with TV3’s Roland Walker, the Director-General of the GES, Prof Kwasi Opoku-Amankwa, “We as Ghana Education Service we condemn it in no uncertain terms. We expect that the security agencies will work as fast as they can to get us the report so that we can act on it quickly".

“Around 1st October we issued a directive to our regions and to our districts and to our schools about the need to ensure that we put in security measures.

“We work with the District regional security agencies to ensure that when the students finish school or about to finish school there would not be any violence and destruction of school properties.”