An former fighter of President Charles Taylor’s erstwhile NPFL rebel group and an accomplice have been arrested and detained in Ghana for the murder on April 25, 2002, of Major General Alfred T. Glay, former Senior Aide-de-Camp to slain Liberian president Samuel K. Doe near the Budumburam Refugee Camp in Ghana. According to information reaching The Perspective from sources at the refugee camp in Ghana, the two men, identified only as “C. Wesseh and Charles,” one of whom was said to be an NPFL fighter, arrived in the camp from Monrovia via the Ivory Coast driving in a Liberian taxicab three days before the murder of General Glay.

The sources said the men had been operating the taxicab while in Ghana, and lured Gen. Glay into the car by offering to drive him home from a wake that night. They then murdered him and dumped his body by the roadside. The Ghanaian police authorities were subsequently alerted to the two men in the taxicab after General Glay’s body was discovered, the sources said.

The late General Alfred T. Glay’s Krahn heritage, his role at the Liberian Executive Mansion (state house) as a senior aide-de-camp in then Doe administration, and his political dissident activities in Ghana made him a likely target of assassination by the Taylor government. Efforts to contact the Glay family in the Washington D.C. area proved unsuccessful. The Perspective will continue its efforts to contact the family.

Notwithstanding, the Glay’s assassination has also ignited a new realm of fears and insecurity among Liberian refugees at the Buduburam Camp, and evoked stern warnings from the Ghanaian immigration authorities that the growing crime waves at the camp may be cause for some refugees to be expelled. “Even though Government welcomes the Liberians with open arms, it would not hesitate to expel criminals among them”, Nana Owusu Nsiah, director-general of the Ghanaian Immigration Service was quoted in the April 25th issue of the Ghanaian Chronicle.

Mr. Nsiah, was part of a team comprising officials of the Ghanaian Interior Ministry, police inspectorate and UNHCR (the U.N. High Commission for Refugees) to visit the refugee camp in the wake of the Glay murder, and to familiarize themselves with the welfare of the refugees owing to increased crime waves and huge influx of unregistered new arrivals. It is said that of the estimated 22,000 refugees at the camp, only 4000 are registered with UNHCR or the Ghanaian government, while at least 104 crimes, including 12 armed robberies, 11 fraud cases, and the Glay murder, have been committed at the refugee camp since January this year.

In the meantime, if the Ghanaians authorities were to succeed in establishing a credible link between the two assassins of Alfred Glay and the Taylor government in Monrovia, then those opposition politicians and civil and opinion leaders whose names were placated on the government’s blacklist better beware. The Glay case proves that those opposition politicians and opinion leaders in refugee camps or elsewhere in Africa may not be too far from the stretched hands of Mr. Taylor and his supporters.

It can be recalled that last January, The Perspective published the names of 46 people, including some staff members of their staff, opposition politicians, human rights activists and opinion leaders who had been blacklisted by the Taylor government for assassination as alleged “security threat to the NPP government.” Unfortunately, General Alfred Glay may have thought his life was not in instant danger since his name was not on the list, and that may have impacted his decision to take the fateful ride in a taxicab with two strangers.