Photo: Sunday Igboho
A lawyer to Nigerian fugitive, Sunday Igboho, has said that the police in Benin beat and handcuffed his client despite being in cell with the door locked.
Periscope International recalls that Igboho, a Yoruba ethnic nationality activist, was recently arrested at an airport in Cotonou on the night of Monday, July 19, when he was about to board a flight to Germany.
Igboho’s Cotonou-based lawyer, Ibrahim Salami, said in a Facebook Live Interview with BBC News Yoruba on Saturday, that the police in the Republic of Benin beat the political enforcer and also handcuffed him despite detaining him in a locked cell.
According to Salami, the way the police are treating Igboho makes eating and movement within the cell difficult for him.
“We are five lawyers handling his case. When we visited Sunday Adeyemo at the police station, he was not beaten but what they did that is alien to the law here is that they handcuffed him inside the police cell after locking the cell. This makes eating and movement within the cell difficult for him to the extent that someone has been helping him in this regard.
“Apart from being a lawyer, I am also a professor of law at a university here in Benin Republic. Part of what we teach our students is human rights. Human rights frown at the action of the police. I called the attention of the police commander and the prosecutor to this but still nothing changed. At the moment, Sunday Igboho’s hands are in chains at the police station. This is not good at all,” he said.
The lawyer also said the Nigerian Government’s representatives told the court that Igboho is a gunrunner who tried to divide Nigeria.
Igboho was arrested at an airport in Cotonou about three weeks after going into hiding following the raiding of his residence in Nigeria’s city of Ibadan on July 1, by operatives of the Department of State Services (DSS) who thereafter declared him wanted.
Sources said Igboho is to be arraigned in a Cotonou court on Monday on charges bordering on illegal procurement of a Bénin Republic international passport with which he planned to sneak out of the country prior to his arrest.
Meanwhile, Nigerian authorities are said to be interested in having him extradited to Nigeria to face charges bordering on gunrunning and treason, among others.