Martin’s Olasehinde
ABUJA – Nigeria’s secret police, Department of State Services (DSS), on Monday granted the detained leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Nnamdi Kanu, access to his legal team after nearly two months of denying him access.
Barrister Aloy Ejimakor, the lead counsel to Kanu’s legal team who made this on Monday eveing said that Kanu was granted access to his legal team following the directives given by the Director General of the DSS, Adeola Oluwatosin Ajayi.
Ejimakor added that the legal team who has been denied access to Kanu since September 27, 2024, was joined by a US-based Ndidi Awurum.
He noted that the legal team’s access to Kanu on Monday was made possible by the intervention of their legal luminary, Hon. Obi Aguocha.
“Today, on the directives of the DG DSS, the #MnkLegalTeam conducted the first successful visitation with MAZI NNAMDI KANU since Sept. 27.
“Mazi Ndidi Awurum, who came from the US, was with us. Our ramrod legal forays & Hon Obi Aguocha’s intervention were crucial to this outcome,” Ejimakor wrote on social platform X.
Ejimakor had severally raised the alarm over the DSS blatant and continued disobedience of extant court order in Kanu’s case by denying the legal team access to the detained IPOB leader.
Kanu is facing trial on terrorism charges levelled against him by immediate former President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration over his call and agitation for a sovereign state of Biafra. He was extraordinarily renditioned from Kenya in June 2021 by former President Buhari’s government and has remained in detention since then.
His initial arrest in 2015 triggered protests by his supporters. In 2017, Justice Binta Nyako of a Federal High Court in Abuja granted Kanu bail.
Upon his release, a military invasion of his ancestral home in Umuahia, Abia State, in September 2017, forced him into exile, hence he did not attend his trial on the next scheduled date and thereafter. From then till June 2021 when he was abducted from Kenya and was subjected to “extraordinary rendition”, and brought back to Nigeria, there has been a robust public debate as to whether he jumped bail or not.
But an Appeal Court had discharged and acquitted Kanu of all terrorism charges, the judgment was later overturned by the Supreme Court which transferred the case back to the Federal High Court.