A state-owned wire news service has gotten hold of the tricycle rider whose alleged collision with a truck transporting ten tonnes of explosives (ammonium nitrate) to a mining site triggered the massive explosion that rocked Apiate in the Western Region.
He told the Ghana News Agency that he was rather hit by another vehicle from behind and rushed to a nearby health facility before the explosion occurred.
"I didn't collide with the said truck, neither was I at the scene during the explosion," the rider (name withheld) said.
He said he was receiving treatment at the health facility when he was informed that a truck had exploded.
“I don’t know where that story is coming from because I was not at the scene. I did not see any truck around me when the accident occurred. I was in the tricycle with one woman and the two of us were carried to the health facility.
”The people that conveyed us to the hospital later informed me that it was a sprinter bus that hit my tricycle and that the driver ran away after the accident,” he insisted.
Police say their preliminary investigations show that a mining explosive vehicle moving from Tarkwa to the Chirano Gold Mines collided with a motorcycle resulting in the explosion at Apiate, a farming community between Bogoso and Bawdie in the Prestea Huni-Valley Municipality in the Western Region.
READ ALSO: Scores feared dead after explosion in Western Region town
A team of investigators from the Criminal Investigative Department of the Ghana Police Service on Sunday, January 23, 2022, interrogated the truck driver and the rider of the motorcycle believed to be involved in the accident.
The team interrogated the two persons at the disaster site as part of measures to unravel the cause of the explosion.
The driver of the truck looked distraught with a part of his face bandaged. The motor rider had his elbow and knee bandaged with bruises on his hand and chin.
The truck driver declined to engage the media after the interrogation, saying: “I have been instructed not to speak.”
The CID team said the interrogation would help them to unravel the circumstances that led to the accident and the subsequent explosion.
Fourteen people were killed and 179 others injured in the explosion, which occurred on Thursday, January 20, 2022.
The Minerals Commission on Saturday shut down Maxam Ghana Limited, owners of the explosive truck, to pave way for investigations into the accident.
Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia who led a Government delegation to the community on Friday, said Government would collaborate with the State Housing Corporation and mining companies to construct temporary housing facilities for those displaced in the explosion.
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GNA