NHRC panel summons police intelligence team over “cruel inhuman” allegations

The Independent Investigative Panel on Human Rights violations against the Nigerian Police Force brutality has summoned the Inspector General of Police’s Intelligence Response Team (IGP-IRT), DCP Abba Kyari, and Inspector Vincent Makinde.

The two officers were summoned before the panel in a case of alleged arbitrary arrest, detention, cruel inhuman, and degrading treatment involving Mr. Rapheal Tersoo and Moses Mfe.

The panel chairman Sulieman Galadima (rtd) on Monday said DCP James Idachaba, police’s lead counsel, must ensure that Kyari and Makinde appear before the panel.

Galadima said the officials will be subjected to a public presentation of how everything that transpired in the course of the arrest, investigation and the victims were subsequently remanded at the Suleja correctional services.

The counsel to the victims, Mike Usahfa, said his clients Tersoo and Mfe have been subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment by the police since 2019.

Usahfa told the panel that his clients were arrested on the 22nd of November 2019 in new GRA Makurdi, Benue State and that after spending a week at the Makurdi zonal command headquarters of the Nigerian police, they were transferred to Abuja and have since been in detention.

He said since the arrest of his clients, they have not been arraigned before any court of law and that all attempts to secure their bail were rebuffed by inspector Makinde, who insisted that the sum of N1 million must be paid before they could get bail.

According to Usahfa, Mfe’s whereabouts is still unknown.

He, however, said he was reliably informed that he was shot in the course of his arrest and sustained an injury, and has not been allowed to access any form of medical care, adding that he fears that he may have been extra-judicially killed.

He prayed the panel to make an order releasing them conditionally or unconditionally in the interest of justice.

While reacting to the allegations, Idachaba told the panel that in all his years in practice, it has come to him as a rude shock to hear that the suspects were remanded in prison by the police.

The case was adjourned to Thursday 17 December 2020 for further hearing.

The National Human Rights Commission in November inaugurated the panel on the allegations of human rights violations by the defunct SARS, to complement the work of the state judicial panels, set up in the wake of anti-police brutality protests in different Nigerian cities.