One person has been shot after a combined team of police officers and the Forestry Commission’s Rapid Response Team moved to flush out armed illegal miners who invaded the Jimira Forest Reserve three days ago.
The team was attacked by heavily built armed men, later identified as individuals invited by the Ashanti Regional Security Liaison Officer, Capt. (Rtd.) Mohammed Jabari, to assist in an operation.
The team, comprising 34 police officers drawn from the Ashanti Region/Nkawie Division and 19 rapid response forest guards, acted on a JoyNews report of an invasion of Compartment 13 of the Jimira Forest Reserve by armed illegal miners.
Midway into the operation, they were confronted by 20 heavily built men armed with pump-action guns and machetes at Amangoase, near Adobewura.
The team told JoyNews that one of the attackers aimed a gun at a police officer, while another attempted to slash one of the officers with a machete.
Police shot one of the assailants in the leg, and the team managed to disarm them.
The Ashanti Regional Security Liaison Officer, Capt. (Rtd.) Mohammed Jabari, whom the team encountered en route to the site, told JoyNews he had invited the armed men to assist in flushing out the illegal miners.
“I also read the JoyNews report on the invasion of the Jimira Forest Reserve and made plans to go there and address the situation. I invited Alhassan to bring some boys to assist us. I was not at the scene, but when I got there, I saw they were having a confrontation with the police and one had been shot,” he told Erastus Asare Donkor.
“I learnt that when they met the police, one policeman cocked his gun, and the boys also raised their machetes,” he added.
The injured person, he said, is undergoing surgery at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi.
He described the attack on the team as a misunderstanding.
The Jimira and Offin Shelterbelt Forest Reserves have come under severe attack by illegal miners. Recently, the Inspector General of Police (IGP) conducted a raid to flush out the illegal miners, but they returned three days ago, invading the Bonteso section.
The police and forestry team managed to arrest four suspects, retrieve two pump-action guns, and impound four excavators.
Earlier this year, a member of the Forestry Commission’s Rapid Response Team, who went on patrol duties in the Apemkro section of the Offin Shelterbelt, was slashed in the knee with a machete by armed thugs who had invaded the reserve.
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