Incarcerated Managing Editor of the Daily Searchlight Newspaper, Kenneth Agyei Kuranchie, has asked members of his family and supporters not to worry over his current state.
Instead, he has asked those grieving or worried over his imprisonment, to keep faith with him since God knows best.
On Tuesday, July 2, 2013, the judge presiding over 2012 election petition, Justice William Atuguba, handed down a sentence to Mr. Kuranchie and Stephen Atubiga, a member of the communications team of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), to serve 10 and three days imprisonment respectively for criminal contempt.
Irene Kuranchie, a junior sister of the detained journalist, who visited Ken together with one other sister at the Ho Prison where he is being kept, told Daily Guide yesterday “he was in high spirits and asked us`not to be worried and that he will be fine.”
At the time of their visit, Irene narrated that executives of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in the region and the constituency including its parliamentary candidate for the area in the 2012 elections had also gone there to visit Mr. Kuranchie not only to show solidarity but to also give him consumable items.
She, however, noted that there was little they could discuss because he (Ken) was under tight security, with a prison warden standing right beside them as they interacted.
“I think he had just woken up from sleep; he was okay. We asked whether there was any problem when he was being escorted to Ho; he said he encountered no difficulty and that he was okay,” she emphasized.
Mr. Kuranchie is believed to have been whisked to the Ho Prison, which yesterday, a politician, who had worked there during the PNDC era, described as “one of the worst jails in the country”.
Sympathizers of the jailed journalist, including the Member of Parliament (MP) for Nsawam-Adoagyiri, Frank Annor-Dompreh, were disappointed when they were told Ken was not being held at Nsawam when they had gone there to visit him in the morning.
It was much later when word filtered in that he was at the Ho Prison. It is unknown whether he would serve the 10-day sentence there.
Stephen Atubiga, on the other hand, is said to be serving his three-day sentence at the Akuse Prison in the Eastern Region.
While Ken composed a commentary in his newspaper in which he raised a number of issues about certain discussions of the Supreme Court, Stephen passed comments on Asempa FM to the effect that there would be civil war if the Supreme Court overturned the Electoral Commission’s (EC’s) declaration of John Mahama as the winner of the 2012 presidential elections since they in the NDC would not accept that.
The court, therefore, found all two guilty of criminal contempt and sentenced them accordingly.
Source: GhanaWeb
