Armed soldiers have been videoed randomly stopping, searching and brutalising civilians in Wa, the Upper West Regional capital, over a missing mobile phone.

Some of the locals were asked to lie in open sewers while others were doused with hot water or tasered.

It is not clear when the marauding soldiers went on the rampage but a video of the incident got widely circulated on social media on Thursday, 1 July 2021, a couple of days after some soldiers shot and killed protesters in Ejura, Ashanti Region.

One of their victims was the Public Relations Officer of the Upper West Regional Coordinating Council, Mr Cletus Awuni, who said: “They hit my head about three times and my back” and also tasered his hands and chest.

Narrating his ordeal on Thursday, Mr Awuni told Accra-based Citi FM: “This afternoon, I got a call that the military personnel were brutalising people in town. We saw that they were beating everybody. In the process of inquiring why people were being beaten, I was also beaten.”

“I called the military commander to find out what was happening and he said he didn’t know anything about what they were doing, so, the commander said he wanted to call the 2nd in command”.

“As we were speaking, people were being beaten, so, I decided to take a video and send it to the commander so he sees what the boys are doing”.

“They saw that I was filming them and they asked why I was filming them. I said I was on a phone call with their commander then they started beating me up.”

“They demanded that I delete the video and I told them I won’t delete it. They started using the taser on me to delete the video.”

“It took the intervention of one police DSP to shout at them that they are beating the PRO of the Upper West Regional Coordinating Council before they stopped beating me”, he narrated.

“They gave my phone back to me and I was driven to the hospital by my driver,” he explained.