A trial that lasted almost 12 years reached a milestone on Thursday when Justice Ishaq Bello of the FCT High Court, Abuja, sentenced two police officers, Ezekiel Acheneje and Emmanuel Baba, to death for killing two of the six Igbo traders in Apo, Abuja on June 8, 2005.
The two policemen were found guilty of killing Augustina Arebu and Anthony Nwokike.
However, three other police officers, including a then deputy commissioner of police — Danjuma Ibrahim, Nicholas Zakaria, and Sadiq Salami — were set free, discharged and acquitted by the court for want of evidence.
A sixth accused police officer, Othman Abdulsalam, has been at large since the case started and had no legal representation.
Delivering judgement in a nine-count criminal charge brought by the federal government against the police officers, Mr. Bello said the court had no option than to convict the two men on account of their own confessional statements that they shot the two traders based on instruction from superior officers.
Mr. Bello said the action of the two police officers was callous and barbaric because by law, they were supposed to preserve the lives of innocent citizens.
The judge further said that their action was condemnable because there was no evidence that the two traders did anything to constitute threat to police at the time they were shot dead.
Justice Bello said that the killing of the two traders was particularly painful because they were arrested by members of the public alive and handed over to the police only for the same police, to take laws into their hands by summarily executing them.
The judge discountenanced the retraction of the confessional statements during the trial by the two convicts.
He described the retraction as an afterthought, because the statements by the convicted police officers were outright confessional.
The Apo Six Killing
The case centred on the alleged extra-judicial killing of five young auto-spare parts dealers in Apo, a satellite town in Abuja, and a young woman, by police officers on the night of June 7, 2005.
The victims, Ekene Isaac Mgbe, Ifeanyi Ozor, Chinedu Meniru, Paulinus Ogbonna, Anthony Nwokike, and Augustina Arebu, were said to be returning from a night club when they were stopped at a police checkpoint.
The police had claimed that the victims, aged between 21 and 25 years, were members of an armed robbery gang that had opened fire on the officers when accosted at the checkpoint.
But a judicial panel of inquiry set up by former President Olusegun Obasanjo found the police account to be false and recommended the trial of the six officers for extra-judicial killings.
The indicted officers are Danjuma Ibrahim, Othman Abdulsalami (now at large), Nicholas Zakaria, Ezekiel Acheneje, Baba Emmanuel, and Sadiq Salami. The defendants had pleaded not guilty to the charges.
But 12 years later, the trial continued to drag on in court.
The five officers accused of the killings and eight other police witnesses eventually testified before the panel of inquiry that Danjuma Ibrahim, the most senior of the accused officers, had allegedly ordered the killings of the youth.
According to the report of the panel, the victims were at a nightclub located at Gimbiya Street, Area 11, in Abuja that night of June 7, 2005 when they had a face-off with Mr. Ibrahim after the only female among the victims, Augustina Arebu, allegedly turned down romantic advances of the senior police officer.
Mr. Ibrahim had allegedly stormed out of the night club to a police checkpoint at the end of the street and told the officers on duty that he had sited a group of armed robbers in the area.
According to the panel’s report, which formed the bulk of the evidence in court, when the six unwary young people later arrived at the checkpoint in their car, Mr. Ibrahim allegedly had the car blocked and ordered the officers to shoot at the occupants.
Four of the six died on the spot, but two of them, Mr. Nwokike and Ms. Arebu, survived the initial onslaught.
This article originally appeared on PremiumTimes.
