Kanu, who spoke when his legal team visited him in the Department of State Services (DSS) detention facility on Thursday, also lamented the increasing cases of attacks and killing of people in the South East by security agencies on various “unjustified” allegations.
The leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Nnamdi Kanu, has raised an alarm over secret arrests and detention of his supporters in various detention facilities and army barracks across the country by the Nigerian security agencies.
Kanu, who spoke when his legal team visited him in the Department of State Services (DSS) detention facility on Thursday, also lamented the increasing cases of attacks and killing of people in the South East by security agencies on various “unjustified” allegations.
Kanu’s lead counsel, Ifeanyi Ejiofor, in a statement quoted the secessionist group leader as saying, “Biafrans (Southeasterners) should appreciate at this juncture, that we are in a very serious situation demanding a total change in narrative.”
According to Ejiofor, Kanu strongly admonished his supporters and the people of the Southeast zone to jettison any order or declaration that might result in any form of violence; as he expressed “greatest sadness that Biafrans are being dumped daily inside the detention facilities of various security agencies with no traces of the places nor particulars of their detention.
“He described as alarming the rate this massive onslaught on innocent citizens is gaining prominence.”
Kanu opined that “people should be guided by this hard fact, that each time the criminal gangs commit offence on our land, those that bear the brunt are our innocent fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters, who are usually killed, and others arrested unprovoked and dumped at the different formations of the security agencies across the country, where they are being detained at the pleasure of the establishment.”
Ejiofor said Kanu “further demonstrated the seriousness of this factual situation we are being confronted with, today, the DSS served on our Law Firm, a bundle of documents they filed in one of the matters we are prosecuting against them, and strangely, they included a long list of Biafrans being detained at Wawa Barracks, Niger State, as those being detained at the pleasure of the state. This is how messy the situation has gotten.”
The statement noted that Kanu was emphatic and further admonished that Southeasterners people should stop playing into the hands of their common enemies.
“Onyendu directed our people to tread with utmost caution because he is not under any illusion that those still fermenting trouble on our land in the purported name of the struggle are the real enemies of our people,” Ejiofor said.