Family burnt to death * After explosion in sitting room

Front Page: Wednesday, January 4, 2012 Story: Albert K. Salia TRAGEDY struck a household at Asylum Down in Accra in the early hours of yesterday when a family of three were burnt to death after an alleged explosion in the sitting room of their three-bedroom storey-building. Apart from the owner of the house, David Nii Teiko Ammah, who could only be identified by his head, the two other victims, Nii Ammah’s wife, Gifty Ammah, 51, and his daughter, Phoebe Ammah, 10, were burnt beyond recognition. Two others, identified only as Tettey, 17, and Joshua, 10, who survived the inferno after residents in other apartments of the house pulled them out, are currently on admission at the Police Hospital. By the time personnel of the Ghana National Fire Service (GNFS) got to the scene at about 12:35 a.m., everything in the highly fortified house, including the burglar proofs, had been burnt and mangled. Nii Ammah, popularly known as Wallace, was yet to go to bed after he had returned home from a family meeting at Hansonic, near Dansoman, at which the final funeral arrangements for a deceased relative were the agenda. Nii Ammah was the Managing Director of Waham Enterprise, a construction firm and also a general merchant. A nephew of the deceased, Mr Richard Ammah, who lives in an apartment in the compound, told the Daily Graphic that it was a tenant in the house who had shouted for help on seeing the fire in the deceased’s sitting room. He said the tenant had come out of his room to find out what could have caused the dog in the house to bark for a long time, ostensibly thinking thieves had invaded the house. According Mr Ammah, it took the efforts of other tenants and some residents to break through a portion of the wall of the building to pull out Tettey and Joshua. He claimed that Tettey and Joshua said they had heard an explosion from their bedroom on the ground floor. He said the two said they had immediately informed Nii Ammah about the fire, who in turn asked the two to climb up to the top floor of the building. The nephew of the deceased said at the time they came out of their rooms, the fire had extended to the top floor, from where there was no exit nor entry, since the entire building had been fortified with burglar proofs. Mr Ammah said they did everything possible to put out the fire downstairs but it was not successful, until personnel of the GNFS responded to their call to put it out, by which time it was too late to rescue those who had died. The Head of the Public Relations Unit of the GNFS, Divisional Fire Officer Grade III Mr Samuel Sowah, told the Daily Graphic that the GNFS was yet to establish the cause of fire, as investigations were still underway.