Mr.
Gordon Obua, former Chief Security Officer to President Goodluck
Jonathan has died in
the custody
of Department of Security Services (DSS)
in its Abuja Headquarters where he had been detained since Thursday,
July 16, 2015 on the orders of President Muhammadu Buhari. Obua was arrested on Thursday when he honoured an
invitation by the DSS and had been in solitary confinement until
his death.
According to reports reaching The Trent, Obua who was diabetic and hypertensive was being detained by the DSS in an underground
dungeon for undisclosed reasons and was being denied access to his
lawyers, family, doctors and his medicines on the orders of the new Director
General of the DSS, Lawal Daura. The DSS (also called SSS) serves as
Nigeria’s secret police.President Buhari appointed Lawal Daura, his
kinsman from his hometown in Katsina on
July 2, as head of the DSS after firing
Ita Ekpeyong.
Daura was recalled from retirement as he had retired from the service
of the DSS when he reached the mandatory age of 60 according to the
Civil Service rules of Nigeria.
Obua’s remains are
still in the custody of the DSS at the time of filing this report. He
was held without charges filed against him.On July 18, 2015, Onochie
Onwuegbuna, the lead partner at Zeran Legal, has
issued a press statementon
behalf of Obua’s family complaining about the conditions in which
his client was being detained and said that his client was
being witch-hunted by the Buhari government.
He said his client was
diabetic and hypertensive and was being denied his drugs as well as
food and water by the DSS.Obua, until his death, was an employee of
the DSS and his employer knew about his medical conditions but
decided, in impunity, to deny him access to his medicines and doctor,
his lawyer alleged.Onwuegbuna said that the Buhari government had
‘marked’ his client, and other individuals who held offices in
Jonathan’s administration and the arrest of his client was a
scheme, “in other to implicate them by all means for phantom
crimes or offences”.A non-governmental organisation, the
Society for Global Justice had issued
a statement on
Obua’s continued detention at the DSS, on Saturday calling for the
release of the former Chief Security Officer.
Executive director of
the group, Mr. Marcus Ogabe confirmed that Obua was detained at the
SSS headquarters in Abuja since Thursday.The group also said the
continued detention of Obua is indicative of “the tyrannical,
autocratic and dictatorship tendency of the Muhammadu Buhari
administration”.“Obua
has been detained since last Thursday at the headquarters of the
State Security Services in Abuja without charge.“He
was also not told the reason for which he is being detained, the
group said.
