The coalition of Igbo-British lawyers has condemned the arrest of leader of the Indigenous people of Biafra (IPOB), Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, in a foreign land and his forceful repatriation to Nigeria, while fingering Kenya in the plot.
In a statement by Attorney E.R Okoroafor in Glasgow, Scotland, the group said Kanu’s arrest was “illegal and archaic.”
It accused the Kenyan government of playing a major role “in the illegal detention of the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra MAZI NNAMDI KANU and subsequent handing him over to the Nigerian government without any due process.”
The group said Kanu “entered Kenya with his British passport, and the Kenya government is fully aware of his citizenship status but still went ahead to perpetrated their illegal act which does not only breach the personal human rights of MAZI NNAMDI KANU but also undermine the sovereignty of the British government.”
Giving notice to the Kenyan government of a legal action against it, the group said “we shall be heading to the International Criminal Court to rectify the injustice done as it is trite law that injustice to one is injustice to all. We are also by this medium informing the Nigerian government that they have 48 hours to return MAZI NNAMDI KANU to the United Kingdom and if he has any charges to answer to, they should as a nation that is governed by the constitution, pass through the legal means of filing an extradiction notice as failure to do so, we shall not hesitate to term this an a declaration of war on not only on MAZI NNAMDI KANU and IPOB but also on all IGBOS generally, and this we shall vehemently resist with all apparatus of law available at our disposal.”
The lawyers warned that “no bodily harm whatsoever must be done to MAZI NNAMDI KANU to avoid a total breakdown of law and other in the fast crumbling entity called Nigeria.”