Ile-Ife: Police maltreat arrested Yoruba suspects, says O’odua group
Calls for judicial inquiry
The police is maltreating suspects arrested following the ethnic crisis at Ile-Ife, the O’odua Liberation Movement, (OLM) has said. The group’s National Coordinator, Mr Gbenga Awosode who is also a lawyer said he visited the suspects in Abuja on Tuesday and was surprised about the state of their health and general wellbeing.
The group in a statement on Wednesday made available to Irohinoodua said the Federal Government appears to have made up its mind that the arrested suspects, all of them Yoruba are guilty even before they are taken to court.
“I was at Abuja where the detainees are being kept. In the first instance, I noticed that they are not allowed to see their relations. They are kept with hardened criminals. Even though the crisis was between Yoruba and Hausa-Fulani settlers, no single Hausa-Fulani has been arrested. All the people arrested are Yoruba people. This is a shame” the OLM said in the statement.
He said the suspects are not well fed and that four of them are down with malaria and have not been attended to. “These are suspects and not convicts. Even where they are kept, the police ratings of Hausa-Fulani origin come to threaten them with death vowing that they would avenge the killing of their kinsmen.
The OLM stated “The Hausa-Fulani were the aggressors. They killed an Ile-Ife indigene and paraded his head on a stick. This is an assault on the Yoruba sacred values. Women and children see the horrendous parade of the human head and they filed on the streets dancing and singing in Hausa language.”
The group stated further that “In Yoruba culture, we value human lives. For instance in our tradition, when a man faces murder for cruelty against humanity, his or her dead body is treated with respect. We treat the living and the dead with respect. This was what provoked anger in the indigenous Ile-Ife people. By the time the dust settled, there were casualties on both sides.”
Awosode said the Federal Government has shown a clear case of bias against the suspects. “We act as if we are not in the same country. We act as if one ethnic group is more precious than the other. The continuous detention of the suspects is against the principles of fair hearing. Almost all those arrested have nothing to do with the crisis at Ile-Ife. They were picked from their homes. Some were arrested from Ibadan and obviously had nothing to do with the crisis.”