Businessman petitions IGP over police conduct in Teshie-Manet land dispute

Habib Musah Adams, a Spintex-Manet businessman, has petitioned the Inspector-General of Police over the handling of a land dispute on his 1.49-acre property at Teshie-Manet, opposite the T.B. Joshua Church, accusing officers of repeatedly arresting his workers while allegedly allowing those he says were involved in an unauthorised demolition on his land to go free.

The petition, dated 14 September, was copied to the Police Intelligence and Professional Standards Bureau (PIPS), the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) and the Registrar of the High Court's Land Division. Adams says he has held the parcel of land since 2012.

He alleges that after he began fencing the property earlier this year, police officers repeatedly intervened in the dispute, resulting in the arrests of his workers on five occasions over a two-month period. According to the petition, the dispute intensified on 11 July when the rear wall of a commercial building belonging to Artin and Haykouhe Kassardjian - identified as the third and fourth defendants in a related civil case - was demolished. Adams says the wall was not on his property and that he neither carried out nor reported the demolition.

The most serious allegation concerns 9 September, when Adams says an unauthorised demolition took place on his property while he, his contractor and project manager were attending court over an unrelated remand hearing involving 11 of his workers. He alleges that a police officer who arrived while the demolition was under way arrested and handcuffed the machine operator, and that members of a Regional Anti-Land Guard team arrived minutes later, released the operator and his equipment, and instead detained the workers who had reported the demolition.

Adams is asking the IGP to direct PIPS to conduct an independent investigation into the conduct of all officers involved, to establish who authorised the various police interventions, to identify an individual referred to in the petition as Mboma, and to examine the circumstances surrounding the prosecution and remand of his workers. Eleven tradesmen were remanded on 3 September and were later released after another court declined to remand them again a week later, according to the petition.

The petition does not establish that any police officer or the named defendants committed wrongdoing, and the allegations have not been independently verified. The Ghana Police Service and the other parties named in the civil proceedings had not publicly responded to the allegations at the time the petition was filed. Ownership and use of the disputed property remain the subject of proceedings before the High Court, and the next hearing in the related criminal proceedings is scheduled for 21 October 2026.