Five members of the Anointed Place Chapel, a church founded by Francis Antwi, popularly known as Rev. Obofuor, have been arrested after they attacked officials of the Tema West Municipal Assembly on Monday.
The Head of the Local Government Service, Nana Ato Arthur in a Citi News interview said the five persons and other members of the church pounced on the officials when they visited the Tema branch of the church on a routine exercise to inspect their building permit.
“They got to the Anointed Palace Chapel at about 11:30am and as a normal practice, the Head of Works requested for their building permit documents, which they failed to produce. The head of works had previously issued four summons to the church but the leadership of the church never showed up,” he said.
According to Mr Arthur, the taskforce was further instructed to write on the Church walls following their failure to produce the permit but the Church members attacked them with sticks and cutlasses when they began to undertake the exercise.
“He [Head of Works] further instructed the taskforce to write on their portion of the wall as usual, to produce permit. Just when they moved to carry on, some youth of the church pounced on them and started beating them with sticks, metal strips, cutlasses and smashing the vehicles of the Engineer, the Municipal Finance Officer and the rest of the taskforce.”
A police complaint was later made by the Assembly to the Sakumono Police Station who took up the matter and arrested five of the culprits.
Mr Arthur said the Local Government Service strongly condemns the action and will not in any way countenance such behaviour by any organization.
“We want to send a strong warning to Anointed Palace Chapel an every organization anywhere in Ghana that what happened yesterday is unlawful and we condemn it in no uncertain terms,” he said.