Kingsley Ofosu

Kingsley Ofosu (born 1970) is a Ghanaian who made international news in 1992, when he survived the slaughter of a group of African stowaways by the crew of the Bahamian-flagged cargo ship MC Ruby. In all, eight men were killed, including Ofosu's brother. Ofosu was the only survivor.

Ofosu's ordeal was dramatized in the 1996 feature film Deadly Voyage, produced by Union Pictures for distribution to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Home Box Office (HBO). The film starred Omar Epps as Ofosu.

Early life Born in Ghana in 1970, Kingsley Ofosu was the eldest of four children and left school early to help his mother make a living selling produce. He had wanted to become an automotive engineer, but lacked the money to pursue the necessary studies in that field. Instead, as a young man, he found intermittent work on the docks in the port of Takoradi.

Stowing away Voyage According to Ofosu, he and seven other Ghanaians, including his half-brother Albert Codjoe, stowed away aboard the MC Ruby, a Bahamian-flagged, Ukrainian-crewed cargo ship, on 24 October 1992. The ship was docked in Takoradi, taking on a load of cocoa. Eventually, the six crew members began removing the group two to three at time. Although they told the men that they were being moved to a more comfortable accommodation, the crew in fact had decided to murder the men, beating them with an iron bar and shooting them, then finally throwing them overboard somewhere off the coast of Portugal. Prior to leaving the ship, he had left his Ghanaian identification papers in one of the ship's cocoa sacks, providing evidence of the truth of his story once it was found.

Four of the crew members soon confessed to the crimes

In 1995, at the end of the trial of the ship's crew, French courts had also ordered €100,000 in compensation to be paid to Ofosu. As of 2007, Ofosu said that he had seen none of these funds either, with all of his efforts to pursue the matter with the French Ministry of Justice having been rebuffed.