Court rules Nnamdi Kanu’s 2017 arrest was illegal, charges to continue

A Nigerian court on Wednesday ruled that the 2017 violent arrest of a man accused of secessionist push in the country was illegal, even though it sustained the State’s charges of treason against him.

As the Abuja high court adjourned the treason trial of the leader of South-East secessionists’ leader, Mr Nnamdi Kanu, the Abia State high court on Wednesday declared his arrest in 2017 was illegal.

Kanu, currently facing charges for his push to split up Nigeria, was attending a hearing in the High Court in Abuja when Justice Benson Anya of the Abia State High Court in Umuahia ruled on a previous case in which he was violently bundled into a police truck from his house in 2017 after police raided his house.

Justice Anya ruled that the 2017 action against the 54-year-old leader of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) was unlawful and an infringement on his human rights.

The court awarded N1 billion (about $2.4 million) against the government.

However, the case may do little to lessen the blow on his continuing charges of treason, terrorism and felony.

Embattled IPOB leader

After 2017, he was released on bail whose conditions he flouted after he fled the country.

Last year, he was taken back in the country after Nigerian authorities said they had arrested him in London with the help of intelligence agencies.

The UK denied this and his family later claimed he had been arrested in Kenya, something that Nairobi also denied.

In Abuja, Mr Kanu also on Wednesday pleaded not guilty to the 15 charges bordering on treasonable felony and terrorism, preferred against him by the Federal Government.

He pleaded not guilty before Justice Binta Nyako when the case resumed at the Federal High Court in Abuja.

Kanu, who was brought into the courtroom around 10:15am, said he was innocent of all the allegations levelled against him, even as he complained from the dock that some counts in the amended charge were similar.

Meanwhile, immediately the embattled IPOB leader finished taking his plea, the prosecution counsel, Mr Labaran Magaji, told the court that he was ready to proceed with the trial, adding that he had brought two witnesses to testify against the defendant.

However, Kanu’s lead counsel, Mike Ozekhome, told the court that he had on Tuesday evening, filed a 43-paged preliminary objection for the charge to be quashed and struck out without the matter proceeding to trial.

Labaran, however, argued that Kanu’s two applications were not ripe for hearing, stressing that he would require time to go through them to be able to respond.

In a brief ruling, Justice Nyako noted that since Kanu’s first application is challenging the propriety of his trial, as well as the competence of the charge against him, the court ought to hear it first.

The court, subsequently, adjourned until February 16 to hear the pending application.

The federal government of Nigeria had on January 14, 2022, filed fresh charges on treason and terrorism against Kanu.

Kanu who fled Nigeria to the UK in 2018 after he was granted bail was re-arrested and arraigned on July 2021.

He is running a campaign on the platform of IPOB for the re-awakening of the Biafra Republic, a secession movement that led to a civil war in 1967-1970 to bring South East back in the fold of Nigeria.

The war caused the death of more than one million people.