AWKA – Contrary to reports making the rounds in the online media that Police Area Command Headquarters Onitsha allegedly tortured 5 persons to death while in custody, the Police Public Relations Officer of the state command in Anambra, DSP Ikenga Tochukwu Anthony has stated categorically that such allegations are unsubstantiated and challenged witnesses to the said gruesome torture to come out and testify to enable the command take appropriate actions.

The PPRO who spoke with our correspondent exclusively, said such were grave allegations on the image of the Police and needed to be proved beyond all reasonable doubts as he explained that the Police is constitutionally mandated to curb and curtail crimes not to contribute to its escalation.

He said those who claimed they were eye witnesses to the torture and subsequent deaths of the said 5 persons in cell at the Area Command Headquarters Onitsha, should feel free to come to the command headquarters in Awka with such information to enable the police authorities get to the root of it as unsubstantiated claims would not help matters.

Meanwhile, reports from the online media has it that 5 persons allegedly met untimely death while in custody at Area Command Onitsha following alleged gruesome torture by police operatives. Part of the report reads, ” five persons, arrested and detained by the police at Area Command Headquarters in Onitsha, Anambra state, have recounted the horrific and tortuous experiences they claimed to have had during their six weeks of incarceration in the cell.

They alleged that apart from contracting chicken pox alongside other inmates, they also witnessed five other detainees slumping and dying inside and outside the cell as a result of severe torture they were subjected to by the policemen on the orders of a serving Assistant Commissioner of Police, ACP.

Speaking to newsmen shortly at the General Hospital, Onitsha where they had gone for medical treatment, after their release recently, the detainees, Ifeanyi Ezennakwe (44), Somtochukwu Udemba (21), Emmanuel Okeke (24) and Ifeanyi Ifere (28) said that three of the detainees slumped and died right inside the cell, while two others died outside the cell.

They expressed concern that the kind of torture meted out to the deceased suspects usually ranged from shattering their legs with bullets, to flogging/whipping them with iron rods and big sticks, as well as kicking them with hands and legs, adding that once any of the victims slumped and died, police officers would quietly remove the corpse to a morgue and thereafter, deny their presence inside the cell to their friends and relations who came to the station to see them in the police custody.

They recalled that out of the five detainees they counted dead while they were still in detention, three of them slumped and died in front of all the detainees inside the cell mostly at midnight when they could not bear the pains arising from the tortures, while two others died outside the cell.

They further recalled that one of the last deaths that rattled the police was when an indigene of Onitsha was arrested, brought to the station and tortured in like manner. He slumped and died by 2 a.m. and when his relations came to the station in the daytime to ask of him, the police didn’t know what to say and the bereaved vowed to get to the root of the matter.

The former detainees described their stay at the police cell as “horrific and a foretaste of hell fire”. They added that during the one month and two weeks of their sojourn in police custody, they were starved all through day and night, except on rare occasions when they were served with moin-moin and polluted water drawn from the drainage.

According to the detainees, their relations who brought food for them were not allowed to have access to them with the food inside the cell except they bribed the police, until their release on Friday, September 16. “ (Daily Independent)