Troubled family members, sympathetic villagers and vocal human rights organisations and others enraged and disappointed at the barbarous extra-judicial execution, and continued detention of the lifeless body of Mr. Tochukwu Uzukwu, a 25-year-old apprentice recently by killed by Operation Famou Tamgbe had cried out again over the act.
Troubled family members, sympathetic villagers and vocal human rights organisations and others enraged and disappointed at the barbarous extra-judicial execution, and continued detention of the lifeless body of Mr. Tochukwu Uzukwu, a 25-year-old apprentice recently by killed by Operation Famou Tamgbe had cried out again over the act.
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Tochukwu , the last child of his poor parents, hailed from Umuduruejike Umuololo village community in the Isi – Ala Umuozu district of the Nwangele Local Government Area of Imo State had just finished his day’s job at Mr. Gideon Ezekem shop where he sells materials for him with others as an apprentice, and stepped out into Swali, a rough waterfront also called Shell Ramp, few meters away from the Ekoli bridge which stretches over the Yenagoa river, south of Yenagoa, the Bayelsa State capital, to use the floating toilet there.
The deceased did not know that Sergeant Benjamin Ogbuagu and his infamous Team B patrol of the Bayelsa State police command was lurking around, looking for unsuspecting members of the public to arrest and extort money from. At about 6-30pm in the evening of that fateful Wednesday, May 11, 2011, the unlucky apprentice was arrested by the police team led by Ogbuagu. Mr. Victor Ezekem, a building material merchant told our reporter, “ Around 6.50pm in the evening, Sergeant Benjamin Ogbuagu called me on my mobile phone, and said my boy, Tochukwu Uzukwu was arrested with smoking Indian hemp and he does not have money in his pocket and that I should come and bail him with some amount of money. I pleaded with him to release him and that the following day, Thursday, I will come and see him and give him some money, because I know him. And you know Tochukwu is my first cousin, the person he was staying with as an apprentice is my younger brother (Gideon Ezekem ) and Tochukwu father is dead, and his mother is aged and down with terminal ailment. Imagine, Ogbuagu handed him over Famou Tamgbe” He broke down and wept uncontrollably while narrating the ordeal to our correspondent.
It was further gathered that when the putrid police officer, Ogbuagu couldn’t wait for Victor’s promise, he handed over the baleful boy to Sergeant Boniface Nwagboso and his flagrant Famou Tamgbe Team 10. A woman in her late 60s, who witnessed the death spoke to our reporter in good English, “You and I know that the fear of Operation Famou Tamgbe is the beginning of wisdom, my family has suffered in their hands coupled with this one I saw. They didn’t hide what they did to the boy. Not only me, did others. They took him to the river by the side of the road, and pointed their guns at him, to say his last prayers. And fater that jump into the flowing river. The boy was shouting seriously,I am an Ibo boy, I am not Ijaw I cannot swim. They forced him into the river at gunpoint, and he got drowned. When they came to search for his corpse on Sunday, May 15, 2011, I was here, because I live around here. I am a grandmother. They found it but the corpse smelt. The blood of that poor child wouldn’t leave them’.
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Our reporter called Aliyu Musa , the Bayelsa State police commissioner and his line was busy, a text message making inquiries about the incident was sent to him, and he did not reply until time of this report. The police boss has allegedly taken custody of the stanching corpse of the impoverished building materials apprentice. Comrade Morris Alagoa, a staff of the Benin, Edo State-based Environmental Rights Action (ERA) and Bayelsa State secretary of the Lagos-based Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO) who had made frantic efforts with his CLO members to get justice this latest victim of state lawlessness decried the act. Enough of these senseless killings by this army of occupation and intimidation called Operation Famou Tamgbe. The time is now. We must put an end to this act of inhumanity. This time around, those who commit this barbaric act must face the law now or never. I call Amnesty International and others to join us to get justice for the family of this poor boy who had barely spent a year in Bayelsa State as an apprentice when this Tamgbe people killed him. They have been killing and they wouldn’t escape this time around “.
Operation Famou Tamgbe was created few months before the April 2011 elections in Nigeria by the Bayelsa State Governor, Chief Timpre Sylva. Critics of the governor accuse him of forming this special task force to achieve some political aim of intimidating and eliminating his political foes, though the government has consistently denied this, claiming that is to complement security arrangement in the restive state of the Nigeria’s central Niger Delta. Operatives of the force, are drawn from the police, though take directives from the governor, and are implicated in several cases of extra-judicial executions, illegal arrests and detention. During the just concluded national elections, especially the State Assembly election, Tuesday, April, 26, 2011 in Bayelsa State, the special operation squad aided the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in the violence and riggings of the election against the opposition Labour Party(LP). Operation Famou Tamgbe in Ijaw denote kill and throw away, is headed by Mr. Aniete Akpan Eyoh
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