June 30th is a date I will never forget. To be precise, it was June 30th 1982 in London. I had just completed a 12-week course in journalism at the Thomson Foundation Editorial Centre then at Elephant and Castle in Southeast London and had decided to spend an extra week or two enjoying a little bit more of life in London.

The 1982 FIFA World Cup was in progress in Spain and being an avid football fan, I was always glued to my television set to take pleasure in the football action. My younger brother Eric who lives in the UK had left on holidays in the West Indies and I had the whole flat to myself.

An early phone call on the morning of June 30th halted my morning sleep. My colleague, Peter Dwaah, the Ghana News Agency correspondent in the UK had had information that three High Court judges and a retired Army Major had been kidnapped and killed in Accra. He said he needed to confirm the story and hung up.

Before I could recover from my stupor, I had three more calls from other colleagues who had heard the rumours and sought to compare notes with me. I then decided to make a few calls of my own at the same time fiddling with the radio set to get a confirmation of some sort. An hour later I managed to hit one FM Station which said curtly that four bodies had been found 20 kilometres from the capital on the Accra plains suspected to be those of the murdered high court judges and retired soldier.

By noon the story had been confirmed and the names of the judges identified. I arranged to meet Peter Dwaah in his office where we went through all the stories filed by the various international news agencies on the Ghana story. As we pondered over the events at home, Peter had to deal with a plethora of phone calls from number Ghanaian refugees who had escaped from Jerry Rawlings’ 1982 coup.

Eventually, it was decided that since it was a World Cup day with an attractive fixture between Brazil and Italy at the knockout stage, we could comfort our souls with a good football match.

Both Peter and I are avowed supporters of Brazil and were naturally backing Socrates and his Samba senors to triumph. But that was not to be. Paolo Rossi of Italy rose to the occasion scoring a hat-trick that saw Italy eliminating Brazil 3-2. I was so depressed by the events of the day that I decided to cut short my holiday. I called Ghana Airways to book me to Accra on their next available flight.

June 30th 1982 was one of the saddest days in my life and I will never forget that date.