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Late Ja'afar Adam Assasination: Police arrest another Desert Herald publisher, Tukur Mamu, after granting "clearance" to Gov. Ibrahim Shekarau

July 2, 2009

Image removed.Mallam Tukur Mamu, publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Desert Herald Newspapers, has been arrested by the Nigerian police on  2nd July, 2009  and taken away to Abuja by security agents of the Nigerian police.
Mamu's arrest took place at about 2:30 pm when first the security men called Tukur Mamu on phone and asked him to make himself available at  the Police Headquarters in Kaduna to have a discussion on his recent petition to the Police Inspector General regarding threats to his life.


On getting there along with two of his younger brothers, Mohammed Mamu and Bilyaminu Mamu, the police authorities ordered them to park their vehicle at the premises of the Police Headquarters in Kaduna, while they were forced into another police vehicle which drove them directly to the office of Desert Herald and the residence of Mamu for search, as the Police brandished a document they claimed was a "search warrant."

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At one point one of the policemen named 'Mohammed' started hitting, punching and kicking Mohammed Mamu, Tukur’s younger brother, just for using his mobile phone.
At the Desert Herald office where the police earlier held the place under siege for more than 3 hours, the operatives searched everything and everywhere for incriminating materials. They then took the publisher to his house and conducted further searches. It was from the publisher’s house that the operatives took him back to the Kaduna Police Headquarters where the two younger brothers were released, while Tukur himself was  driven away to the Criminal Investigations Bureau at area 10 , Garki Abuja according to police sources.
It would be recalled that Desert Herald has earlier published a story on the murder of late Sheikh Ja’afar Mahmud Adam to commenmorate two years of the late cleric’s assassination which had remained unresolved.
Since then, Mamu has been receiving threatening calls from the Kano State government threatening to destroy him and Desert Herald newspaper for daring to republish the Sheikh Ja’afar story, which was inspired by popular online media   www.saharareporters.com.
It is pertinent to observe that since the beginning of this democratic dispensation which started in 1999, this makes the fourth time incidents of massive media harrasment of this magnitude is  happening; the other three being those of African Independent Television (AIT) and Channels Television, when their offices were raided and staffers detained; and the Leadership newspaper incident that led to filing of of "criminal libel" cases against editors of the newspaper.
This is an effort to inform the general public on the matter with a view to showing how the security agencies in Nigeria seem to operate to muzzle the press whenever it performs it constitutional duties to investigate and inform the general public about hiddens acts of terror of abuse of office.
We call on the relevant authorities to look into the matter in all its ramifications so that the media could have the freedom and  that the excesses of  security agencies could be properly checked.
 The Nigerian police force led by one DIG Ajao, yesterday , claimed that the Kano State governor, Ibrahim Shekarau, who was named in the reports we reproduced has been "cleared" of complicity in Ja'afar's murder. The police authorities, strangely, also claimed that they have killed those that assassinated the cleric in a shoot out with Islamic fundamentalists. These bizarre assertions flies in the face of rudimentary police investigations known to any serious police agency, the resort to harassment of Mamu and the Desert Herald was aimed at forcing this hasty and suspicious clearance to the Kano state governor down the throat of the public.



Signed:
Sadiq Mu’azu
Assistant Editor
Desert Herald Newspapers 

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