During the August #EndBadGovernance countrywide demonstrations, one of the participants gave a terrifying account of how DSS agents held and tortured him for more than 60 days after arresting him in Kano.
According to Khalid Aminu, an engineer by trade, he was arrested in early August along with other young protesters against poor government and hunger.
Aminu alleged that during his time in the Kano office of the DSS, he was denied contact with his family and endured various sorts of dehumanizing abuse.
He appeared as a guest on Friday’s episode of the sociopolitical show Inside Sources with Laolu Akande.
He spoke slowly and weakly as he recalled, “They (DSS operatives) blocked all of us at the NEPA Roundabout and packed about 11 of us on the day three of the protests (August 3) and took us to their command.” His face was still covered in the shock of the incident, indicating that he is still getting over the “horrible” experience he had under the secret police’s control.
“I was detained from August 3 to October 17.” My 68-day stay with the DSS was shortened by one week when we were transferred to the penitentiary facility following our court appearance in Kaduna.
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They continued to bring in more and more people while we were in detention, until there were perhaps 39 of us.
He characterized his ordeal under the secret police as “horrible” and something he would like not to recall.
The demonstrator remarked, “I can’t even begin to tell you everything,” adding, “What I went through, what we went through was inhuman.”
We were arrested at the NEPA Roundabout on August 3rd. After that, they began beating us. Kicks, boots, and everything else. After pushing us all into our Hiluxes and some into our SUVs, we descended to the Command.
The first item I was given when we arrived was a sturdy cane, which resembled the armored cable they used. I’ll show you if I pull up my chest. They began pounding me until I was flat on my back and they were using every kind of weapon they could think of, including sticks and armored wires.
They led me to a garden with a jagged patch of grass after that. We were instructed to lie down and to pull our clothing. They doused me with water as I lay on this jagged grass. I was being beaten and told to roll from side to side. With water all over me, I tumbled from end to end. There were a variety of insects on this grass. It was hence double penetration. The situation was awful. For roughly an hour, that went on.
After instructing us to crawl down a gutter, they urged us to face the sun when we emerged. We stayed for an additional hour. After that day, it changed to a different kind of agony. You cannot maintain psychological stability just on your diet.
Aminu and his associates were charged with illegal assembly and displaying Russian flags, but the #EndBadGovernance activist refuted the accusations. “In the first five days of the protests when we were arrested, there was nothing like the Russian flag,” he stated.
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Ibrahim Wali, Aminu’s attorney, also stated on the show that there was no reason to arrest the demonstrators in the first place because the constitution makes it quite plain that the arrestee must be charged with a crime within 48 hours.
According to the Administration of Criminal Justice Act, “you can apply for an order to remand further for 14 days when you need to,” he said, but there was no remand order in place.
“They were sent to the correctional center after they entered a not guilty plea when they were arraigned in court on October 10,” the attorney stated, adding that the DSS’s allegation that the demonstrators had assembled illegally was unsupportable.
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“The police had a responsibility to prevent riots during protests, but they failed to do so and attempted to shift the blame to the demonstrators.”
The attorney added that even if the DSS and the Federal Government dropped the case against the demonstrators due to its lack of validity, the Bola Tinubu administration should nonetheless apologize to the young activists and give them compensation for the unjustified crackdown and torture.
