Police has laced behind bars a married couple pending investigation in connection with a dead goat that left 36 young people with health complications in Tappita, Nimba County.
Josiah and Lydia Balieh could be charged and forwarded to the Magisterial Court in District 9, where scores of young people have been hospitalized at the Jackson Fiah Doe Memorial Regional Hospital, following the consumption of a dead goat.
Some of them who were earlier treated and discharged from the Memorial Hospital, have been re-admitted for more treatment as their health condition continues to deteriorate since Monday, July 17.
Those re-admitted are believed to be suffering from severe stomach pain, along with other health complications, but amongst them is an 11 year old girl, whose situation is said to be critical and could be transferred to Monrovia.
Since the incident, doctors and nurses at the hospital continued to remain tight-lipped as to what really went wrong.
However, Lydia and Josiah who stand accused, admitted to the state broadcaster (ELBC), from her detention cell in Tappita, to have cooked a dead goat that she and her children found while on their way to their farm on Sunday, July 16.
She said they were neither the owners nor killers of the goat but found it along the roadside en route to their farm, so they took it with them and cooked it for those who went to work on their farm the next day, Monday, July 17.
Lydia stated, among many things, that following the eating of the goat, most of the workers started getting sick, after which the news spread in their town, Bewein, thereby getting the attention of many residents.
She said an ambulance was immediately called from the Jackson F. Doe Hospital, but before it could reach there, most of them were already vomiting severely and suffering from running stomach.
Mrs. Balieh claimed that she and her family did not know that the dead goat they took from the roadside and cooked for their farm workers had been allegedly injected with poison, neither did she know who could have done it.
The incident, which is the second of such to have happened within this month (July), is raising lot of public concerns as to the safety and sale of cow and goat meat on the local market in the country.
In a statement early this week, Sierra Leonean authorities banned the movement of cattle from Liberia, as well as the importation of meat from the neighboring country, due to the still unexplained death of 36 cows in Kelima Bendu Town, Foya Statutory District, Lofa County, near the border.
In Liberia, an investigation is underway into the cause of death of cattle in early July, in a field in the town of Kelima Bendu, Lofa County, about ten kilometers from the Sierra Leonean border and about fifteen of Guinea. Liberian authorities have not said when the results of the investigation will be known.
