Hearing by the Lagos State Panel of Judicial Inquiry into complaints of human rights violations by men of the disbanded Special Anti-Robbery Squad, SARS, continued on Saturday with a schoolteacher, Ndubuisi Obiechina, narrating to the panel how she was arrested in 2017 on a bogus allegation of being a thief and a kidnapper and tortured by SARS men till her then two-month-old pregnancy was aborted.
The schoolteacher, who appeared before the retired Justice Doris Okuwobi-led panel alongside her husband, told the panel that she was detained for 22 days and tortured till she lost her pregnancy.
She named the officers who tortured her as Phillip Rilwan, Christian and Haruna Idowu.
She 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. 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.”
The judicial panel, which began hearing on Tuesday, is also probing the shootings of October 20, 2020, at the Lekki tollgate where eyewitnesses said uniformed men opened fire on #EndSARS protesters, killings at least seven and injuring about 30 youths in the attack.
