Deportees refuse to disembark from plane at Kotoka

Dozens of Ghanaian and Liberian deportees from the United States of America on Wednesday morning were said to have refused to disembark from a plane that had brought them to the Kotoka International Airport in Accra.

The deportees were said to have complained of inhumane treatment meted out to them by the authorities including putting hand and ankle cuffs on them.

Speaking to Accra based Class FM, some of them said their movements had been curtailed and didn’t understand why they were treated as criminals.

Some of them said they had been detained since last Thursday from Pennsylvania and continued to wear cuffs even on the plane. 

They said it was only when they arrived at Kotoka that the officials tried to remove the cuffs for them to disembark but they refused and insisted they wanted to come out with the cuffs for the public to witness the “inhumane” treatment meted out to them.

Immigration officials however managed to convince them to disembark and at about 11am, some of them came out of the airport building.

One of them told Class FM that as deportees, they were supposed to have been provided with subsistence allowance for some days but nothing was given to them and since they didn’t have family members in Accra, they didn’t know how they were going to get to their final destinations.

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