Amnesty International has raised the alarm regarding the prolonged detention of Sunday Ifedi and his wife, Calista, reportedly abducted by security agents.
The couple was arrested in November 2021 and reportedly labelled as members of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB).
“Mr. Sunday Ifedi and his wife Calista were abducted by Nigerian security agents in Enugu on 23 November 2021, over alleged membership of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) All efforts by both lawyers and family to trace their whereabouts failed,” Amnesty International said in a statement on Saturday.
The organisation noted that it is deeply concerned by the detention of the duo and urged the authorities to release them or charge them to court.
“Amnesty International is deeply concerned that such unlawful detention puts the couple at the risk of torture and other ill treatment. The Nigerian authorities must immediately and unconditionally release them — or charge them to court,” it said.
In the statement, the organisation raised alarm that since 2016, there have been hundreds of unlawful arrests and detentions in South-East Nigeria, “as well as many cases of disappearance of persons after arrest by security forces.”
In August 2023, SaharaReporters detailed how Merit Ifedi, the victim’s daughter, recounted the raid by Department of State Security agents on their home, resulting in the abduction of her parents.
According to Merit, her parents were arrested for allegedly aiding IPOB.
She said, “DSS raided our home and abducted my parents. I’m their first daughter and I have two other siblings. So on that day, it was around 4 am in the morning, they came to our house, knocking and banging on the door. So my dad woke up. He started waking all of us up.”
“He thought they were robbers. So he was like ‘Stay inside, let me check what is going on’. So he saw them fully armed and he said ‘What sort of thing is this?’ And then they said, ‘Open the door, open the door’.
“He said we should stay inside, and that he would find out what was going on. So he asked them to come through the back door. They asked why would they come through the back door and said he should open the front door.
“He said the front door was locked and that they should come through the back. And our dog was at the back of the entrance. So as they came through the entrance, the dog started barking.
“They said if the dog made another sound, they would shoot it. We asked what was going on. They said ‘Open the door, open the door.’ Then my dad opened the door and said ‘How may I help you?’ They said, ‘We are here in search of something, when we find what we are looking for, you will know’. They came with a tracker, they said he should call everyone out. So my daddy decided to call all of us out.
“They said we should bring out phones. They said we should dial a number. We dialed the number. They looked at our phones, they said the number was not there. We kept asking for what they were looking for. They said they were there with a tracker and that we would know that what they were looking for.”
She said the DSS operatives at that point asked her mother to bring out her phone and insisted on searching through it.
She continued: “They asked my mum where her phone was and she gave them. But they said there was another phone and that the one she gave them was an old phone that she was no longer using. She decided to bring it out and started charging it, we were there waiting.
“They did not allow us to call anyone or make any calls; they pointed guns at us. So she brought the phone out. They looked at the phone. They said ‘It is here’.
“She was asking what it was. ‘What are you talking about?’ she asked. They did not even give her any information about what they saw or anything. They said they should come with them to the station. She asked, ‘For what reason?’
“We asked what they were going to do, where they were taking her to, who they were but they did not even talk. They just pointed guns at us and said we should stay inside and lock the door.
“As they moved out, the last person that was there left the door, and we ran outside. We saw about two Prado SUVs and 10 Hilux vehicles leaving our compound. My siblings started shouting. What is going on? Elders started coming out. They were asking what happened.
“Before we knew what was going on, they had already left. People were now asking us who those people were, we said we didn’t know. As we described them, they said it was DSS. But they came with soldiers and all of them were armed.”
She revealed that since her parents were taken away to an unknown location, the DSS had denied family members and other interested persons the chance to see them.
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