DSS men forced the legal team members to remove their shoes, glasses, thereby offering them slippers after searching them like hardened offenders.
Operatives of the Department of State Services have extended their lawlessness to the legal representatives of Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, as the secret policemen subjected the counsels to inhuman treatment.
Ifeanyi Ejiofor, the lead counsel to the separatist revealed this in an update to SaharaReporters on Thursday following the lawyers’ routine visit to the IPOB leader.
Ejiofor stated that the DSS men forced the legal team members to remove their shoes, glasses, thereby offering them slippers after searching them like hardened offenders.
Though he reiterated that the encounter was successful as Kanu was motivated as ever, he condemned the treatment of the lawyers as both dehumanising and embarrassing.
He said in a statement, “The routine visit to our client, Nnamdi Kanu, was conducted today, and it went successfully.
“Our client, Nnamdi Kanu, specifically requested for his kind regards and compliments to be conveyed to millions of his teeming supporters and well-wishers. He is deeply appreciative of your unwavering solidarity/support. He didn't hesitate in requesting that you all continue to pray without season, because it is positively impacting.
“However, today's visit witnessed a fundamental change in the hitherto procedures conventionally adopted for conducting the visit.
“We were initially unperturbed by the method now introduced by the DSS, but we feel compelled in the prevailing circumstance to make public our strange experience which borders on the improper treatment of lawyers in the course of conducting a court-ordered visit to their client who is undergoing trial.
“Lawyers on this visit were searched in a manner akin to a situation where hardened criminals are being searched for possible incriminating substance and object.
“They were traumatised not only because they were inhumanly treated as criminals on investigation, but the lawyers were further dehumanised after this embarrassing and unwarranted frisking, by being allowed to wear only slippers, after being divested of their shoes, reading glasses and writing materials, to visit their client.”
The legal practitioner, however, said the Kanu’s lawyers would not condone such demeaning experience in the subsequent visits, adding that it was unpardonable and intolerable.
He urged Kanu’s supporters to be steadfast, focused, peaceful and law-abiding not minding the humiliating experience they faced.
“Though, it readily called for immediate intervention of the Court seized of the matter because it is our right as clearly backed up by the Order of the Court, to visit Our Client on these specified dates and times, but subjecting lawyers to inhuman treatment in the course of conducting a legitimate visit is what we consider unjustified and unacceptable.
“We cannot be subjected to any form of intimidation/harassment during subsequent visits to Our Client, because the alien style is only targeted at imputing fear in us, which action we shall resist within the confines of extant laws.
“We shall get this infraction addressed by the Court in the fullness of time, as processes incidental thereto has been promptly initiated.”