Eleven people have died, and several others sustained injuries in a multiple-vehicle crash at Ofankor Barrier in Accra, the Ghana National Fire Service has confirmed. The collision happened around 4:00 a.m. on Thursday, 13 August 2026, on the overpass off the main road, forcing a diversion and causing severe traffic along the stretch.
The pile-up began when a tipper truck knocked down a tricycle rider and drove off, according to an eyewitness account relayed by an assemblyman at the scene.
A police officer stopped to direct traffic around the body, and vehicles arriving behind him crashed one into another in succession, trapping a passenger van in the middle of the wreckage where most of the deaths occurred.
ADO1 Alex King Nartey of the Public Relations Unit of the Ghana National Fire Service had earlier confirmed ten fatalities and seven others unconscious. The figure has since risen to eleven, with several people injured. King Nartey also indicated that one survivor, a girl under 15 years of age, has had both of her legs severed.
How the crash began
Assemblyman Quarshie told the media at the scene that the sequence began with a hit-and-run involving a tricycle, popularly known as an aboboyaa.
“I met one of the eyewitnesses, and he narrated the story to me. He told me that there was an aboboyaa that was knocked down by an articulated truck driver, but the driver did not stop and drove away. The aboboyaa rider died on the spot. Then, a policeman arrived, saw the body, parked, and started stopping cars to direct traffic”.
Assemblyman Quarshie
The officer’s intervention was the ordinary response to a body on a busy road before dawn. What followed turned a single fatality into a mass casualty event. The assemblyman described how each driver arriving at the scene met a stationary vehicle without warning.
“When he parked, there was a tipper truck behind him that did not know what was happening, so when the driver saw the policeman stopping him, he stopped. Then, there was a passenger car behind him; the driver did not know the tipper truck had parked, so he crashed into the truck”.
Assemblyman Quarshie
A third vehicle then compounded the crash. “Then came a third car, whose driver did not know there was an accident, and crashed into the passenger car. The passenger car got squeezed in the middle, and that is where about 15 passengers were trapped inside,” he said.
The vehicle caught between the truck and the cars behind it absorbed the force from both directions, and the assemblyman’s account places most of the deaths there. “So I can tell you, almost all lives were lost in that van because it was trapped in the middle of a total crash,” he said.
The impacts did not stop with the third vehicle. “Then a fourth passenger car, whose driver didn’t see what had happened, also crashed into them, and about two people died in that car, too,” he narrated.
Rescue and clearance
Fire Service personnel worked to extract the trapped occupants and recover the dead from the compressed vehicles. The Service has since cleared the road to allow free flow of traffic on the stretch.
Ofankor Barrier sits on one of the busiest arteries into Accra, carrying traffic from Nsawam and the wider Eastern corridor into the capital. Heavy goods vehicles share the route with commercial passenger vans and tricycles, a mix that concentrates risk in the pre-dawn hours when visibility is poor and traffic moves at speed.
What the investigation must establish
The account from the scene raises questions that only a formal investigation can answer. The driver of the truck that struck the tricycle rider left the scene, and identifying that vehicle will be the first task for police.
Investigators will also examine what warning, if any, stood between the stopped vehicles and the traffic approaching behind them. An officer directing traffic on foot before dawn, without cones, flares or a marked vehicle positioned to be seen at distance, offers little protection against a truck arriving at speed.
The number of people in the trapped van, put at about 15 by the eyewitness account, will also need confirmation. The Ghana Police Service has not yet issued a statement on the crash. Formal identification of the dead and a confirmed casualty figure will follow the completion of recovery work and hospital assessments.
READ ALSO: Convictions Alone Cannot Measure Special Prosecutor’s Success, Osae-Kwapong
