A legal practitioner, Ndubuisi Onyeakpa, has told a Federal High Court sitting in Awka, Anambra State, presided over by Justice I.N. Uwaigbo that 20 policemen scaled the wall of his family house at Umunze to arrest him.
Onyeakpa explained that the team of policemen came at about 1am and added that his offence was that he was handling a land matter for his Umuicheke community in Orumba South Local Government Area of the state.
The legal practitioner, through his lawyer, Mr. Zokas Aniazoka, asked the court to stop the police from harassing and intimidating him.
He asked for damages for what he called police brigandage.
Onyeakpa said, “The police were armed with dangerous weapons with the intention of killing my client and not arrest as they claimed.”
He submitted that no law permitted the police to scale anybody’s wall at such an odd hour for arrest.
Objecting, the counsel for the defendant (police), Mr. Ndubuisi Onwuka, said the police had the right to invite any suspect for interrogation upon reasonable suspicion.
He said upon the report of a murder case against the applicant, the police took steps to invite the applicant and others for interrogation.
Onwuka noted that the applicant evaded police invitation, fled and went into hiding, even as he urged the court to dismiss the applicant’s application for lack of merit.
He said, “This is not a fundamental right matter. It is a criminal matter. A lawyer should not be seen running away from the law.
Arguing further, the counsel for the applicant, Aniazoka, agreed that the police had a duty to invite any suspect for interrogation, but not in the circumstance under review.
He insisted that the case of his client was different, saying, “In the case of my client, the police had ulterior motive, which was evidenced in the fake documents submitted to the court.
“What happened in this matter was that when the alleged offence was committed, counsel for the 3rd and 4th respondents wrote a letter to the police in which they mentioned all the people they suspected, but the name of the applicant was not on that letter.
Subsequently, the police acting on the letter, sent them invitation enlisting all the names at the back of the paper; and again, the applicant’s name was not there.
“There is one Mr. John Onyeakpa, an uncle to the applicant, whose name appeared on the two documents that was now replaced with Barr. Ndubuisi Onyeakpa in the medical report written by their doctor, alleging that my client has a hand in his death.
“They hired the medical experts in the world for the autopsy report and it came out clean as it stated that the deceased died a natural death.
“Our question now is; can the autopsy report which is their document, the letter from the lawyer, which is their document, the police invitation, their document bearing the same name, stand with other documents that have now been altered with the addition of Ndubuisi Onyakpa’s name and with the disappearance of Mr. John Onyeakpa?”
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