Renowned Ghanaian visual artist and CEO of Red Clay, Ibrahim Mahama, has given more details of the brutality he suffered in Tamale, allegedly at the hands of officials of the IGP’s Special Task Force, popularly known as “Black Maria”.
Speaking in a video clip from a public engagement shared by GTV on March 23, 2026, Ibrahim Mahama, who was recently awarded a diplomatic passport by the government, claimed that he was attacked by members of the “Black Maria” after he refused to hand over his phone to them.
He said that they had threatened to kill him even after they were told who he was, adding that the incident happened in the presence of the leader of the task force, DSP Bawah Abdul Jalil, who at one point threatened to slap him.
“They started punching me in the face. I still needed to open my phone so that they could delete whatever photos and videos were on it. And I said, I’ll open it. And then they kept inflicting their pain on me. So at some point, I just opened the phone for them. And then Jalil himself was there. He was at the scene in the beginning; he was next to us. I saw his face in the car when he got down.
“When we got to the station, he himself even attempted to slap me when we were there, and my uncle told him that, oh, don’t you (sic)… Even when we got there, the police officers who were on site at Sakasaka told him that, but don’t you know that that’s the guy for Red Clay, Mr Ibrahim Mahama, the one who was given a diplomatic passport. When they said, ‘we don’t care, diplomatic my foot’,” he said.
He claimed that one of the police officers threatened to kill them when they were at the police station.
“I remember when we were at the station, one of them even authored a statement that if we joke, ‘they will kill us and nothing would happen’,” he said.
He added that the said police officer said he would “damage” them and nothing would happen to him.
The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Red Clay further stated that not even the mention of the name of his father, Alhaji Savannah, a known political figure in the Northern Region, could save him from the hands of the “Black Maria”.
“They said that ‘Alhaji Savannah, what’s his contribution to their party? Don’t you know how we suffered for the party? What nonsense are you talking about?’ So at that point, I realised that there was actually no hope. We didn’t have a phone, nothing. We couldn’t do anything,” he said.
He said that claims by the police that they were saving him (Ibrahim Mahama) and his team from a mob attack were completely false.
He added that a video showing his driver begging the leader of “Black Maria” was doctored to make them look bad.
Watch a video of his remarks below:
