A retired police officer, Elder Sunday Joel Udoh, has appealed to the National Human Right Commission to prevail on the Rivers State Commissioner of Police and the Commander of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad to release the corpse of his son for burial.
Udoh who made the appeal at a public hearing on alleged human right violations by the Special Anti-Robbery Squad in Port Harcourt on Monday said his son, Nsikak Sunday, was killed by men of the squad in 2017.
Udoh said that since his son was killed, he had made several efforts to retrieve his corpse for burial, but was frustrated by men of SARS who he alleged were in custody of the corpse.
He said that the police lied to him that his son was in police custody only to discover that he had been killed and his corpse deposited at University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital (UPTH).
“It was when UPTH said that it wanted to carry out mass burial of unclaimed corpses that I started writing the police to release my son to me for burial,” he said.
Another case of extra-judicial killing by the men of SARS which came up for hearing was the murder of Lovely Omoregie whose lawyer, Ben Aiky told the panel that the police has resorted to intimidation so as to force the family to withdraw the case.
He said that men of the Nigerian police, Benin Division had on several accounts, threatened him and offered him the sum of N1.5m to let go of the case, a claim denied by the counsel to the Benin division of the Nigerian police, Policarp Odion.
In another development, several cases of SARS brutality were not heard as the human rights commision told the panel that the victims were threatened by the men of SARS and are scared of their lives.
The Executive Secretary of NHRC Tony Ojukwu had said the commission had received against SARS in the south-south, complaints of abuse of power, arbitrary and unlawful arrest and detention, enforced disappearances, extra-judicial killings, prolonged detention without trial , extortion, brutality, torture, inhuman and degrading treatment.
