Commanding Officer of the 4th Infantry Battalion, Lt Col Kwasi Ware Peprah, has dismissed reports that the military aimed and killed youth protesters at Ejura.

He explained kneeling is part of a strategy adopted by the force to disperse crowd as he comments about the yet-to-be-identified soldier, who was captured in viral photos on his knees.

“There is a procedure in dispersing crowds. The first is a verbal warning. The second is to cork your weapons to signal to the crowd that you are about to fire. The third is to fire warning shots but the signal to scare them includes kneeling to aim for you to be scared maybe disperse,” he told the three-committee probing the incident on Wednesday, July 7, 2021.

Lt Col Peprah argued no casualties were recorded from the angle the soldier reportedly knelt and fired the shots, adding the men applied minimal force.

“As a matter of fact, the direction of the man who knelt was such that no casualty came from that side. He didn’t fire. He didn’t fire. He fired only warning shots but when he went down, he didn’t fire,” he maintained.

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The committee is made up of George Kingsley Koomson, a Justice of the Court of Appeal as Chairman, Security Analyst, Dr Vladimir Antwi Danso, and Juliet Amoah, Executive Director of Penplusbyte, a civil society organisation.

They have up to July 9, 2021, to probe, collect and collate facts on circumstances that led to the death of two persons and four injured at Ejura on June 29, 2021.