On the 3rd November, a trader identified as Ndukwe Ekwekwe, narrated the shocking story of how he became paralyzed due to the experience he had with the disbanded SARS officials to the Lagos Judicial Panel on Inquriy.
Narrating the story, he said he was arrested at the Alaba International Market on February 16, 2018 without any charge.
He said:
“They immediately removed their SARS shirts and began to shoot and everyone ran away. I asked them what my crime was and they said the arrest was an order from the Inspector-General of Police (IGP).
I was handcuffed in one hand because they noticed I wasn’t a troublemaker. On our way, they stopped at Igando and came down from the car and were talking.
I used my other hand to reach my phone to try to call my mother, but the Inspector saw me, approached me and asked who gave me the guts to make a phone call and he took the phone, stepped on it and destroyed it.
He stabbed me on my wrist and back and I was hit on the head with the butt of a gun and beaten. They collected the N58,000 that was for my shop,”
He was taken to the SARS office at Ikeja, Lagos, and at midnight he was stripped naked, taken to a torture chamber where he was beaten and tortured.
“I was left there till evening and I didn’t know my crime and till now I don’t know my crime. They kept saying that the intelligence report is on me.
At the night of that day (Feb. 17, 2018), I was taken to my three shops where I sell phone accessories.
They took away my goods worth N15million. I began shouting to attract attention and the commander told them to take me to the top of the two-storey plaza and I was thrown down from the building.
The SARS officer that threw me from that building is Hamza Haruna. They took me back to their office in my injured state”
He told the panel that when his condition became critical, the officers whisked him to the Police Hospital in Ikeja where he was eventually referred to two other hospitals for treatment of his injury.
Due to the incident, he suffered a spinal injury from being thrown off the storey building, which led to his paralysis.
