A school teacher, Ndubuisi Obiechina, on Saturday narrated to the Lagos State Panel of Judicial Inquiry into complaints of human rights violations by men of the disbanded Special Anti-Robbery Squad how she was arrested in 2017 on a trumped-up accusation of being a thief and a kidnapper and tortured by SARS men till she lost a two-month-old pregnancy.
The schoolteacher, who appeared before the panel led by retired Justice Doris Okuwobi alongside her husband, Ogechukwu Obiechina, told the panel that she was detained for 22 days and tortured till she lost her pregnancy.
She identified those who tortured her as Phillip Rilwan, Christian and Haruna Idowu.
Mrs Obiechina alleged that the policemen stole her husband’s N50,000 and compelled them to part with N400,000 as bail fee before they were freed.
Narrating their ordeal in the hands of the SARS men, she said, “On June 1, 2017, I received a text message from an unknown number that I had a parcel from DHL. A caller using different numbers asked for my home or office address and I gave him my school address upon my husband’s advice.
“The following day, I saw a black jeep with huge men inside it. One of them was in a DHL uniform. Immediately, they approached me, they started beating me. They said I should enter inside. They said I was a thief, an armed robber. The one in the DHL uniform removed it. My HM (headmistress) was peeping at us. I said let me go and tell her. They said no.
“I said my kid is there, they said no, that I should follow them, that my kid would die there.“My HM came to the gate; they pointed a gun at me. She asked what was going on. They said, ‘This woman is a thief, a kidnapper. She must follow us and go. They said they were Police, SARS’.
“They pushed me inside the car and moved. The men were slapping, beating me. I was two months pregnant. I started vomiting. That’s when they found out I was pregnant. But they kept torturing me. I told them I did not know the suspect.
“They took me to their office at Ikeja. They took me to a shrine. They hanged me, beat me. They said they would force my baby out of me. They said I must produce the person or die there,” Mrs Obiechina said.
The establishment of such investigative panels by the states and the federal governments was part of the demands by the organisers of the protests against the excesses SARS, which has since been disbanded by the Nigerian authorities.
