ANYAMAM, Ghana — Two years after the disappearance of fisheries observer Emmanuel Essien off the coast of Ghana, another observer has vanished from a fishing trawler. According to his family, 38-year-old Samuel Abayateye was reported missing on Oct. 30. His decapitated body washed ashore nearly six weeks later. Abayateye was assigned to Marin 707, a Ghana-flagged vessel owned and operated by a South Korean company, World Marine Co. Ltd. His brother, Yohane, told Mongabay he last spoke to Abayateye on Oct. 24, when the observer called to say he was trying unsuccessfully to reach his supervisor in Marin 707’s home port of Tema to report an incident. A little more than a week later, officials from Ghana’s Fisheries Commission met with the family to tell them the ship’s owners had reported Abayateye missing on Oct. 30. Both the commission and the police declined to comment to Mongabay, but Yohane said police told the family that one of the ship’s Ghanaian crew members spoke with Abayateye on the evening of Oct. 28 before going to bed, and saw him asleep in the same chair when he woke up around midnight. The sailor said an alarm bell rang the following morning when the fisheries observer was discovered to be missing. On Nov. 2, Fisheries Commission officials assured the family his disappearance was being investigated, but on Dec. 9, Yohane and his friend Emmanuel Doku made a gruesome discovery. “As we were waiting for the police to finish their investigations, the family was…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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