Attack on correspondent: PUNCH petitions IGP, demands punishment of erring officers

The management of PUNCH Nigeria Limited, publishers of PUNCH Newspaper, has petitioned the Inspector General of Police, Usman Alkali Baba, on what it described as the barbaric attack on its correspondent, Toni Ufor, and seizure of his mobile phone and ID card by police officers attached to the Special Fraud Unit, Ikoyi, Lagos, on Wednesday, December 29.

The petition letter, signed by the Editor of The PUNCH, Ademola Oni, described the attack as unwarranted, provocative, uncivilised, crude and barbaric as Ufoh had been duly assigned to cover the case of some tenants allegedly defrauded by a developer, Adewale Tunde, at the Milverton Office of the SFU in Ikoyi and his offence was that he conducted interviews with the victims that were allegedly defrauded by the developer in front of the premises of the Unit.

According to Oni, attacks on PUNCH reporters by officers of the Nigerian Police Force have become a recurring decimal, from Lagos to Imo, Enugu to Kaduna in the recent past and the management of PUNCH Nigeria Limited asked the IGP to use his good offices to “direct that the errant policemen return the telephone set and the ID card of Ufor to him at the corporate head office of PUNCH Nigeria Limited, PUNCH Place, along the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway in Magboro before 6pm on December 30, 2021 to ensure fairness.

“We also demand that these overzealous policemen be punished for taking the laws into their hands by attacking an innocent Nigerian, obstructing a journalist from carrying out his lawful duty, and dragging the image of the Force in the mud through their crudeness and brazen display of their self-imposed power,” the paper demanded.

He explained further that the “power-drunk policemen descended on the helpless reporter, accusing him of recording the SFU office. After he was made to identify himself as a journalist, the overzealous policemen arrested the reporter, deleted all the interviews he had conducted on his telephone set and went ahead to seize the set and confiscated his ID card.

“These cops equally threatened to lock up the journalist when he demanded the return of his set and card which are his lawful property. The intervention of one of the crime reporters on the Metro Desk of the newspaper failed to assuage the flaming impunity of these policemen, who ensured they frustrated the coverage of the assignment for reasons best known to them,” he added.