Death of suspected chicken thieves in custody: Mother relives experience with police

Bauchi State Police Command has declared its resolve to launch a full investigation into alleged inhuman treatment, torture and dehumanisation leading to the death of a suspected thief while in custody.

The disclosure was made by the PPRO, DSP Ahmed Wakili while speaking in an interactive session with journalists at the NUJ Secretariat, Bauchi on Wednesday.

The PPRO disclosed that already, the State Police Commissioner, Lawan Jimeta has ordered for a full investigation of the incidence in order to unearth the true position of things, assuring that any of its personnel found culpable will be dealt with accordingly.

The PPRO then solicited for synergy between the Police Command, particularly his office and journalists in the state in order to promote a crime-free society.

Mother of one of the two suspected chicken thieves who were allegedly beaten to death by police personnel attached to one of the divisions in Bauchi had claimed that her son was tortured to death. She described the day that policemen brought the corpse of her son to their house as the saddest day of her life.

While speaking to journalists at the NUJ Press Centre on Wednesday, Hajara Ismail, claimed that her son, Ibrahim Kampanla, was brought home dead in a police Hilux pickup.

She narrated that, “The policeman who brought my dead son, took him from the car and dumped him on the ground. He fell on his face and that time, unknown to us, he had already died.”

The bereaved mother added, “I don’t know what my son did to the police. When the police came, they entered our house and asked some boys to carry him and they asked them to dump him for me inside the house.

“Then, the DPO (names withheld) said, ‘here’s the corpse of your son, he’s a robber, we arrested him,’ then he turned and left and he turned again and said ‘we were not the people who did this to him, we too picked him like that and we brought him to you.’

“Then, we picked him and put him inside the room and he never moved, he had died,” she further narrated.

The bereaved mother said that her son’s father was not at home at the time they brought Ibrahim’s corpse.

Also, one of the three suspects who survived the alleged torture, Abdulwahab Bello, gave a blow by blow account of how the DPO allegedly tied them to a tree and used a pestle to hit their knees, legs and heads, which resulted to the death of Ibrahim Kampala and Ibrahim Babangida.

Hajara revealed that the DPO, who is being accused of torturing the two suspects to death, “brought my son with six other uniformed policemen in the Hilux but he wasn’t on a uniform.

“His father was sick and I went to call him. I told him to come home quickly and go inside and see Ibrahim, he is dead. He then asked me what had happened and I told him all that happened and what I heard. I told him that some policemen brought him and dumped him in the house but I don’t know what he did to them. I told him that they just came and dumped him and most of us in the house at the time were women and when people saw them on their uniforms, people were just running away,” she claimed.

“He was 30 years old. He wasn’t married yet. Anytime I talked about marriage with him, he’d tell me that he won’t get married now until he helps us and get our own personal house,” she said as she broke down in tears.

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