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| Suspended DCP Abba Kyari |
A lawyer, Kabir Akingbolu, has described the suspended Deputy Commissioner of Police, Abba Kyari, as a "super fraud" and a "criminal worse than Evans" in police uniform.
The lawyer said this in an interview with PUNCH where he explain how authorities have been shielding Kyari's criminal activities.
Below is an excerpt of the interview:
According to a video made available in August 2021, you said you filed a petition against the embattled Deputy Police Commissioner, Abba Kyari, after the #EndSARS protests. What was this petition about?
The petition was filed against Abba Kyari in respect of his criminality committed against my client, Hafeez Mojeed. With some of his cohorts, he arrested my client in a commando style. They got to Mojeed’s house around 9:30pm; the wife was five months old pregnant. They laid them on the ground, collected all their belongings, including the golden wedding rings of both the wife and husband, their travelling and title documents, wristwatch and his 2012 model Honda Accord. They collected 32 items from them which we listed.
After collecting all these things, they took my client to custody. Mojeed said he did not know what he did and he was held in custody for 14 days. They took his ATM and collected its password. There was N840,000 in the account; Kyari and his men used this money to buy things in Shoprite, Chicken Republic until the balance left in that account was minus N200.
Not only that, after beating Mojeed to a pulp to the point where he was dripping with blood, he confessed to them that he had a fixed deposit of N41,800,000 in an account. They took him to a bank and brought a guy with them, one Mr Obi, who was one of their agents used to commit such criminality. There, they ordered my client to unfix the money and transfer all of it to Mr Obi, claiming that he was the rightful owner of the money.
But Mojeed said he did not know and had never met Mr Obi before, so they left the bank, went to a boutique, removed Mojeed’s clothes stained with blood and bought him another one. Then they took him back to the bank and made him unfix the account and transferred the money to Obi and that was the end of it.
There was another money in another bank which was N15m. On getting to this bank, the woman said they should apply but they would have to wait till Monday to get the money and that day was Friday, so they did not unfreeze that one.
Later, I went to Kyari’s office and challenged him on why he withdrew my client’s money and Kyari, in the presence of three of my lawyers and Mojeed’s wife, said “Yes we took his money.” When I reminded him that he had no court order, he then took me to an inner room in his office and when we got there, he said, “Your client is a Yahoo-Yahoo boy, he is not the owner of the money, and there is another N15m with him, so if you allow us to collect it, we will give you N5m and we will take N10m and will release all the properties we seized from him. But if you say you are a human rights lawyer and you shout, you will not get any of those properties.”
I refused to partake in that deal and then he asked me what I wanted and I told him to take my client to court and I will take the bail. He took Mojeed to court, charged him for N97m fraud but he did not show up in court for the case and at the end of the day, the matter proceeded and lasted for 14 months. Kyari and his boys never showed up for one day. Eventually, this matter and another one they filed at the Federal High Court, were struck out.
Was the petition you submitted ever taken up by the police or was a panel ever set up to look into these numerous allegations made against Kyari?
Up till today, my client has become a pauper due to all the properties collected from him. We wrote a petition to the National Human Rights Commission, they contacted Kyari but he did not come. They called us that they were going to write their report, up till today they did not write it. We wrote to Independent Corrupt Practices Commission, they said they would look into it, but did not reply. We wrote another one to them, no response; we have copies of all these letters.
We wrote a letter to Deputy Inspector General of Police Zone II, he did not do anything. We wrote to the Commissioner of Police, Lagos State, he did not do anything. We wrote to the Assistant Inspector General, he did not do anything. We wrote to Police Service Commission, nothing was done. So we now went to court attaching all these exhibits detailing all the affidavits and the bad things that were done to my client.
Justice (Hadiza) Shagari gave us a judgment and said they should release all the properties that were seized from him and she released to him the sum of N41,800,000 collected from his account and the one taken from his ATM and awarded him extra N5m damages against the police, but these properties were not released.
We then wrote a petition to the #EndSARS panel. At this panel, the lawyer to Kyari confessed before the court that they indeed took the car of the petitioner but did not take his company documents, and I made a plea that an order should be made to produce all that was taken from my client but they failed to do this till date.
That panel also tried to shield Kyari. I have publicly stated that Kyari is a criminal worse than Evans because he also kidnap people, take them to the bush, collects their money and kills them, and I challenged him to sue me for defamation or libel if he is truly a ‘super cop.’ He has never done so till today.
How did Kyari become a ‘super cop’ in the Nigerian consciousness; a school of thought has pointed at the mediocrity entrenched in the system, some have blamed the media. What do you think was responsible for it?
I can tell you that he used the media. He is an empty fellow and several of us have been shouting that this man is not who he professed to be, but because he knows how to use the press, our voices were not heard. In the Special Anti-Robbery Squad office in Ikeja, you will find a plaque erected there close to Kyari. Where did he get the money to build that edifice in the first place? That structure is a murder den; they torture people to death there.
My client made gory revelations at the #EndSARS panel that when he was in custody, they killed a lot of people at night and he helped them to pack three dead bodies which they disposed of. These things happened under Kyari’s supervision and I have my evidence and even court judgments against him.
Abba Kyari is an overrated cop. He is a super fraud. What he does is that, when he arrests 10 criminals, he will settle and collect money from eight or nine of them, he will now use one of them to make a noise in the media. He knows how to use the press effectively. If every policeman in Nigeria has to be making videos and granting press interviews in respect of the criminals he has arrested, I do not think our airspace will be free of such things.
With the unfolding of the Hushpuppi scandal, I have been vindicated and I can tell you, if not for his recent offence, the police authority might not have done anything to him. Because they said somebody is on suspension and he was still actively involved in arrests, it means it was a paper suspension. In a good country, the investigation should not take more than a week or two for such a heinous allegation as that. But up till today, we do not see the report of the committee of the PSC on the matter.