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.

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.

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. The stowaways had wanted to travel to Europe, where each man had hoped to find a more prosperous life than what was available to them in Ghana. Ofosu specifically had hoped to pursue his studies so that he could return to Ghana as a trained engineer. After hiding within the ship's holds, the group discovered another stowaway, not previously known to them, who had boarded the ship at its previous stop in Douala, Cameroon.

Six days into the voyage, the group’s water container was broken, forcing them to begin ferreting about the ship in search of more. This resulted in them being discovered by the ship’s crew. Members of the ship's crew took all of the group’s money and then confined them in the compartment containing the ship’s anchor chain. They were held there for three days, being given no food and little water. 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. It was later determined that the crew members' motive was to avoid the heavy fine they would have faced for bringing illegal immigrants into a Western port.

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