, We saw Anambra Police Torture five Detainees to Death while inside Police Cell, Suspects Allege -

We saw Anambra Police Torture five Detainees to Death while inside Police Cell, Suspects Allege

Fresh from the police cell, five persons, arrested and detained by the police at Area Command Headquarters in Onitsha, Anambra state, have recounted the horrific and tortuous experiences they claimed to have had during their six weeks of incarceration in the cell.

They alleged that apart from contracting chicken pox alongside other inmates, they also witnessed five other detainees slumping and dying inside and outside the cell as a result of severe torture they were subjected to by the policemen on the orders of a serving Assistant Commissioner of Police, ACP.

Speaking to newsmen shortly at the General Hospital, Onitsha where they had gone for medical treatment, after their release recently, the detainees, Ifeanyi Ezennakwe (44), Somtochukwu Udemba (21), Emmanuel Okeke (24) and Ifeanyi Ifere (28) said that three of the detainees slumped and died right inside the cell, while two others died outside the cell.

They expressed concern that the kind of torture meted out to the deceased suspects usually ranged from shattering their legs with bullets, to flogging/whipping them with iron rods and big sticks, as well as kicking them with hands and legs, adding that once any of the victims slumped and died, police officers would quietly remove the corpse to a morgue and thereafter, deny their presence inside the cell to their friends and relations who came to the station to see them in the police custody.

They recalled that out of the five detainees they counted dead while they were still in detention, three of them slumped and died in front of all the detainees inside the cell mostly at midnight when they could not bear the pains arising from the tortures, while two others died outside the cell.

They further recalled that one of the last deaths that rattled the police was when an indigene of Onitsha was arrested, brought to the station and tortured in like manner. He slumped and died by 2 a.m. and when his relations came to the station in the daytime to ask of him, the police didn’t know what to say and

the bereaved vowed to get to the root of the matter.

The former detainees described their stay at the police cell as “horrific and a foretaste of hell fire”. They added that during the one month and two weeks of their sojourn in police custody, they were starved all through day and night, except on rare occasions when they were served with moin-moin and polluted water drawn from the drainage. According to the detainees, their relations who brought food for them were not allowed to have access to them with the food inside the cell except they bribed the police, until their release on Friday, September 16.

They narrated how six of them, as staff of G.U. Okeke & Sons Limited, a subsidiary of GUO Group of Companies were arrested by the police on July 30 at the National Inland Waterways Authority, NIWA, motor park at the Bridge-head, Onitsha following civil dispute between Sir G. U. Okeke and Chief Ngozi Okpagu, even as they claimed that the said civil dispute had been decided in favour of Sir Okeke at an Onitsha High Court presided over by Hon. Justice Nwizu.

They said shortly after the decision of Justice Nwizu in favor of Sir Okeke on the civil disputes, NIWA had written Chief Ngozi Okpagu suspending his activities in the park, until he complied with the orders of the High Court but Okpagu refused to comply it.

“But as of today, Okpagu is still running the NIWA park, collecting dues, tolls and fees running into several hundreds of naira on daily basis with the help of armed policemen deployed to the park by the Onitsha Area Commander, against the larger interests of G.U. Okeke’s Company which has a subsisting grant of the land from the customary owners”, they said.

They further recalled that their arrest by the police arose as they were doing their legitimate duty at the NIWA Park as employees of G U Okeke’s Company, that the complainant allegedly instigated the police to descend on them, with the Area Commander himself personally leading some policemen under his command to invade the park, shooting their guns sporadically into the air that reverberated in the vicinity as people scampered for safety.

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