By Chijioke Agwu,
Abakaliki
A human rights group, Committee for Defence of Human Rights (CDHR), Ebonyi State chapter, has demanded the immediate sack of the state Comptroller of Prisons, Mrs. Emilia Oputa, her deputy and other officials following what it described as extra-judicial killings of over 14 inmates in the botched jailbreak at the prisons last week.
During the incident many inmates reportedly died which caused pandemonium at the prisons and its environs. The Comptroller General of Prisons, Ja’afaru Ahmed, had visited the
prison a day after the incident and officially confirmed that six inmates died while 16 others sustained bullet wounds even as the state comptroller had earlier denied any loss of life in the incident. But briefing reporters in Abakaliki, the state Chairman of the Human right group, Comrade Emeka Anosike, accused the prison officials of cover-up on the matter.
‘‘We are not happy the way inmates were killed in the incident of last week. The state Comptroller General of Prisons, Mrs. Emilia Oputa, in a press conference at the prison yard, denied that there was no casualty resulting from the attempted jailbreak the previous day.
‘‘There was a big twist to the claim when the Comptroller of Prisons, Ja’afaru Ahmed, visited Ebonyi State to have a firsthand information of the incident, and when he went to brief the Executive Governor of Ebonyi State of the incident, he confirmed to the Governor and pressmen that actually six prison inmates died in the process of security agents attempt to quell the attempted jailbreak and that many others sustained various degrees of injuries.
‘‘With this obvious contradictory statements of the State Comptroller of Prisons and the Comptroller General of Prisons, the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights, Ebonyi State branch felt that there was a cover up and conducted a preliminary investigation into the matter,
which revealed that not less than 14 Prison inmates of the Federal Prisons Abakaliki were deliberately shot and killed by a combined team of security agents, including the Police Mobile Force drafted from the Police Headquarters, Abakaliki, and the armed prison guards, and about 16 other inmates were critically injured as a result of the gunshots they sustained from the attack by security agents’’, the group wrote.
The group demanded for immediate removal of the state Comptroller of Prisons and her Deputy over the inmates’ killings, describing the killings as human right abuse.
It rejected the three-man panel of inquiry set-up by the Comptroller General of Prisons to investigate the killings.
‘‘The panel of inquiry set up by Ja’afaru to look into the matter is unacceptable to us because it is like being judges over one’s case. We want an independent judicial panel into the matter and not the prisons setting up panel.
‘‘There will be lots of cover-up in the panel set up by the Comptroller General of Prisons but if it is a judicial panel of inquiry, witnesses will be called, some inmates who are alive will be called, the hospital authorities will be called and we will also be called to testify on what happened.”