| Unconfirmed Reports reaching peacefmonline say two people have lost their lives following violent clashes that erupted at Avenor, a suburb of Accra, between landguards and some residents in the area, with one of the victims (landguards) having his hand severed off. The clashes come days after the Word Miracle Church secured a court injunction to demolish structures on a parcel of land in the area. But residents claim the land has been the subject of a protracted dispute, thus the WMCI cannot claim ownership. According to reports, a group of youngmen believed to be land guards besieged the place in a vehicle armed with guns and cutlasses. Violence is said to have erupted immediately after the alleged landguards who arrived at the settlement to work on the church’s property began firing erratically. “Most of them were having guns and were firing indiscriminately, they were not warning shots...Already we are in tension for what they did on Friday, we cannot sit down for them to come and destroy everything that we have, so we had to fight them…For the first time they came here, if they had come with an intention to (demarcate) the land we might have understood them, but they came and just started shooting, we cannot understand that,” a resident said. “We suspect they have been given money to destroy us, we won’t sit down for them to destroy us,” another resident added. "Genesis and Arrests" For the past week, Avenor has been the scene of some vicious clashes between the residents and officials of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA). It would be recalled that on Friday, Nov 13th, some aggrieved residents of Avenor took up arms and violently resisted an AMA led demolishing exercise of several unauthorized structures. The clash has led to the death of a land guard, whose arm was chopped off. A resident also lost his life, whiles several other residents sustained various injuries when the residents massed up to retaliate. Reports say the vehicle that conveyed the landguards to the disputed land in question was set ablaze by the irate residents. Meanwhile, 27 suspects who are believed to have had a hand in the brutality have been arrested and are in the custody of police to assist in investigations.
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