Legal analyst and governance expert Austin Kwabena Brako-Powers has issued a stringent caution, arguing that the leadership of the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) must immediately provide coherent, verifiable, and contemporaneous evidence to back their claims of an assassination attempt on Special Prosecutor Kissi Agyebeng and the assault on his Director of Research, Sammy Darko.
Brako-Powers warned that the failure to produce such evidence – or to have filed a formal complaint – has turned the serious allegations into a profound credibility crisis that could dismantle public trust in the OSP and expose its officers to legal sanctions for causing public fear.
“Assassinations and targeted attacks rarely resemble Hollywood scenes; they are often subtle, calculated, and aimed at intimidation”
Austin Kwabena Brako-Powers, Legal Analyst and Governance Expert
Mr. Brako-Powers acknowledged that threats and targeted intimidation against anti-corruption fighters are not unusual in environments where their mandates clash with entrenched political and economic interests.
However, he stressed that the issue is no longer the nature of the threat, but the institutional response to it. The core of the credibility crisis, according to the legal analyst, lies in the preliminary findings released by the Ministry of the Interior.
The Ministry indicated that despite the gravity of the claims – publicized widely on December 6, 2025 – preliminary checks revealed no record of a formal complaint filed by either the Special Prosecutor himself or Mr. Darko with the Ghana Police Service or any competent state security agency.
Brako-Powers described this lapse as “puzzling and consequential.” He argued that any alleged attack on a public officer clothed with investigative and prosecutorial authority must automatically trigger a structured state response, an action impossible to initiate without an official complaint.
The absence of a formal report, he maintained, not only weakens the credibility of the claims in the public sphere but also means that no official evidentiary trail has been created for the State to follow up.
“The immediate questions that arise from such reports are whether any formal complaint was lodged with the Ghana Police Service or other competent security agencies and what became of the investigative processes that should naturally follow”
Austin Kwabena Brako-Powers, Legal Analyst and Governance Expert
Safeguarding Integrity and Accountability
The governance expert emphasized that the OSP leadership’s duty to provide evidence goes beyond mere procedural compliance; “it is essential to safeguarding public trust, institutional credibility and the rule of law.”
He commended the Ministry of the Interior for initiating a probe to establish clarity, warning that allegations of this magnitude, if left unchecked, will inevitably fuel public anxiety, institutional mistrust, and baseless speculation at a time when public confidence in the OSP is already strained by previous controversies.
Brako-Powers insisted that for the rule of law to be upheld, the two officers must present “evidence that is not only coherent but also contemporaneous,” meaning it must have been recorded at or near the time of the alleged incident.
This, he argued, is the only path to validating their narrative and maintaining the necessary public trust required for the OSP to function effectively. The legal analyst argued that the current situation requires strict adherence to accountability on all fronts to prevent the perception of selective justice.
He maintained that there must be consequences in either scenario resulting from the Ministry’s investigation. If the allegations of threats and assault are proven true, the perpetrators must face the appropriate statutory and administrative sanctions.
However, if the full-scale investigation determines the claims are unfounded, Brako-Powers insisted that the law must be applied equally.
He warned that Ghana has seen high-profile security-related claims that were later found to be unsubstantiated, referencing the case involving Hon. Phyllis Naa Koryoo Okunor, whose allegations of a convoy attack the Interior Ministry also found to be without factual support, yet no sanctions followed.
“If past unsubstantiated claims have been overlooked, the State must correct that. Otherwise, the perception will persist that the government’s primary interest is removing the Special Prosecutor rather than upholding the rule of law”
Austin Kwabena Brako-Powers, Legal Analyst and Governance Expert
Brako-Powers pointed to Section 208 of Ghana’s Criminal Offences Act on causing fear and panic, arguing that the principle of equality before the law demands that all persons who make unverified security-related allegations be treated in the same manner, regardless of their political or institutional affiliation.
He cautioned that failure to apply the law uniformly against the OSP leadership, should the claims prove false, will only strengthen the public perception that the primary objective of the current administration is the removal of the Special Prosecutor, thereby undermining the very rule of law the OSP was created to protect.
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