‘Kanu was chained to the floor in Kenya’ — lawyer speaks on IPOB leader’s arrest

Aloy Ejimakor, special counsel to Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, has alleged that his client was chained to the floor at a private facility when he was arrested in Kenya.

In June, Kanu was arrested and extradited to Nigeria to face charges of treason.

Abubakar Malami, attorney-general of the federation (AGF), had said the IPOB leader was “intercepted through the collaborative efforts of Nigerian intelligence and security services”.

Speaking on Kanu’s ordeal in Kenya and how Kanu ended up in Nigeria, Ejimakor, in a statement on Wednesday, said the IPOB leader, who is currently in DSS custody, revealed that he was blindfolded and flown to Abuja on a private jet on Sunday, June 27th, 2021 from Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, Nairobi, and that he was the only passenger onboard.

Ejimakor said he met with Kanu at the DSS headquarters in Abuja and that the IPOB leader told him he was driven to the airport tarmac “very close to the plane without passing through the airport immigration”.

“Kanu was in point of fact tortured and subjected to untold inhuman treatment in Kenya. He said his abductors disclosed to him that they abducted him at the behest of the Nigerian government,” Ejimakor said.

On whether Kanu had an idea of why he was abducted, the lawyer replied: “The people never said much on that score except that they were told he was a Nigerian terrorist linked to the Islamic terrorists in Kenya. But after they discovered his true identity, they tended to treat him less badly.”

Ejimakor alleged that no warrant of arrest “was shown to Kanu or even mentioned to him”.

“And for the eight days he was held incommunicado, nothing of presenting him before a court or transferring him to an official detention facility was ever mentioned. He was held in a nondescript private facility and chained to a bare floor,” he said.

At the DSS office, the lawyer said Kanu was interviewed for the first time “in my presence by three DSS officers”.

“The interview was revealing as it contained certain new allegations that were never heard of before. But they all relate to his status as the leader of IPOB,” he added.

Ejimakor said despite what the IPOB leader had gone through, he was in high spirits and “looked forward to overcoming the extraordinary rendition that brought him to Nigeria”.

“In my opinion, before any court can subject Kanu to trial, it has to first conduct a trial within a trial on the grievous incident that forced Kanu to leave Nigeria and the equally grievous incident that forced him back to Nigeria.

“No court of law, conscience and equity will overlook those two incidents and proceed to trial.”