MAD COPS
•Day policemen wreaked havoc in Kogi as soldiers
did in Odi
By PHILIP NWOSU AND JOE APU
Thursday, March 13, 2008
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•Some
other torched buildings
Pix: Sun News Publishing |
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For the people of Ogaminana, in the Adavi Local Government
Area of Kogi State, the event of February 25 was not different
from the reported Odi massacre of 1999, as they recalled the
ferocity with which mobile policemen attached to the Kogi
State Police Command stormed the town and gave them hell.
Alhaji Suleiman Badmus, an elder in the community, said: “It
was the police. It was the police. They came in large numbers
shooting sporadically, not into the air, but directly at the
windows of houses. We all lay flat in our houses, praying
that nobody should be felled by the police bullet.
“When they were tired of shooting, they went to a nearby
fuel station, got fuel and started setting our houses on fire.
It was a day of mayhem and our heart bleeds that those we
paid to protect us have turned their weapons against us.”
He said that when the shooting ended and the houses had been
torched, the once bubbling Ogaminana, located on the ever
busy Okene-Lokoja road, became a shadow of itself, with burnt
buildings and cars littering the entire area.
More than 5,000 persons were displaced in the mayhem, while
over 60 houses and 150 stalls were torched in the crisis.
Witnesses told Daily Sun that trouble had started when youths
in the local government area of the state barricaded the road
against six trucks belonging to Global Infrastructure Holding
Limited (GIHL), a mineral resources prospecting company in
the area, in protest against the concession of Itakpe Iron
Ore Mining Company to the company.
Chairman of Ogaminana Traders Union, Mallam Salihu Jimoh said
that police stormed the area following reports that a policeman
was found dead and was believed to have been killed by the
youths that attacked the trucks carrying the concentrates.
Some people within government have been fingered as the masterminds
of such attacks, especially considering that the area allegedly
attacked by the policemen, which falls under Kogi Central
Sentorial District is a stronghold of the Action Congress
(AC).
To buttress this claim, the house of the father of the governorship
candidate of the AC, Senator Mohammed Salami Ohiare was attacked,
while his father and siblings were terribly harassed.
Senator Ohiare told Daily Sun: “There is a kind of armed
banditry between the PDP thugs and police led by an imposed
caretaker chairman.”
“On 20th December, they visited the house in the wee
hours of the night, shot at the building and left abruptly.
The following morning it was on the 21st of December they
visited the place again, destroying things and unleashing
mayhem.”
He told Daily Sun that while efforts were being made to evacuate
his father from the centre of the crisis, relations who were
trying to offer assistance allegedly ran into PDP thugs who
had regrouped and came in their large number to unleash mayhem.
“At about 7pm, they came again to unleash full mayhem,
shooting sporadically and destroying things. My father, being
experienced, lay flat on the floor with the family members
and after shooting, they started burning and later they dispersed.
The Almighty God saved the situation because nobody in the
family was hurt,” he added.
They called on President Umar Yar’Adua and the Inspector
General of Police to call the police to order to avert wanton
destruction of property and the killing of innocent people.
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