DSS Has Confirmed Ajaero is in Custody, Lawyer Discloses

Linus Aleke in Abuja

An Abuja based legal practitioner, Maxwell Okpara, has said that the Department of State Service (DSS) has confirmed to him and two others that the president of Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC), Joe Joe Ajaero, is in their custody, but however denied them access to him.

Okpara who was a guest at AIT programme, “Democracy Today,” noted that the operatives of the service simply asked them to go, stating that “any time they are ready for us they will invite us”.

Another guest on the programme and NLC Head of Media and Information, Benson Upah, said that Ajaero’s arrest was a premeditated action calculated to instill fear, not just on the congress but the entire populace.

Speaking further, Okpara averred that the arrest was a calculated attempt to edge Ajaero out of office because they have seen that with him as the Labor leader, they will not have their way. He insisted that the authority wants to edge him out between now and October so as to plant their own stooge in the Labour Union.

According to him, When we got the information of his arrest, we went to Labour House and they informed us that he was nabbed by the DSS. We then rushed to DSS and we were refused access to Ajaero. We were three lawyers and they flatly denied us access to him. We reminded them of what the law said, particularly what section 17 and 35 of the administration of criminal justice system stipulated. They asked us to go that any time they are ready for us they will invite us. And I asked them if they know what they are talking about, we ask if they are going to interrogate Ajero and allow him to write a statement without a legal practitioner of his choice against the law of the land. They simply told us that they are done with us. They are very arrogant about it and we could not fight them and we left”.

Okpara also refuted the allegations that Ajaero refused to honour invitations by security agencies, explaining that Ajaero’s lawyers Femi Falana SAN wrote the police informing them that the NLC president will honour their invite when he returns from his foreign trip on 23 of this month only for him to be arrested in the airport.

On main reason why he was picked up on Monday at the airport on his way out of the country, NLC Head of Media and Information, Benson Upah, said: “We have tried to no avail, it is a premeditated action calculated to instill fear, not just on the congress but the entire populace. Because by the time they do this to the leadership of the congress and they get away with it, few if any would ever like to stand in their way. It is a spread of state terror. It is the beginning of repression in the guise of democracy. We cannot call this a democracy because even the military were not behaving like this. It is a calculated act of state terror and if you look and listen carefully may be something else is happening elsewhere, at least you read in the papers about the visit to SERAP”.

He stated that a clique was working to achieve a specific purpose, urging that “we should locate this clique and tell them to go to hell”.

He assured that they are never going to break the Nigerian spirit in them, adding that Nigerian people are very very diligent people, very easy to deal with forcefully but that force should not be abused.

On the veracity or otherwise of the alleged terrorism financing against the labour leader, he said: “Only the person or institutions coordinating this act of intimidation and terror will be in a position to tell you whether this has anything to do with criminal conspiracy, subversion terrorism financing, treasonable felony, cyber crime or anything else. Only the person or clique coordinating this should be able to give us the answer”.