Apo Shooting Survivor Tells How Security Agents Killed His Co-Tenants

Gambo Idris is a survivor and witness of the shooting that took place on September 20this year at an unfinished building in Apo area of Abuja. 

Testifying today before the National Human Rights Commission, he narrated how security agents shot and killed his co-tenants in the building.
Eight people lost their lives when operatives of the SSS conducted an early morning raid on an uncompleted building in the Apo District of Abuja.
The security agency claimed that the dead and the wounded, as well as other squatters in the property, were members of the Boko Haram sect, but it has since emerged that the victims were commercial Keke NAPEP riders.
Mr. Idris, a tricycle rider, said he woke up at about midnight upon hearing gunshots and had to remain in his room as armed men surrounded the house.
"I saw three masked men in black uniforms shooting a co-tenant in the stomach," Idris told the hearing chaired by the Chairman of National Human Rights Commission, Chidi Anslem Odinkalu.
He said he stayed in the room with another man until the gunmen left. The two of them saw the intestines of the shot man.
Idris said the shootings lasted an hour. The survivors left the buildings for "Gwari Hill" and had to wait 30 minutes until the security men had left.
Only then the policemen came to their rescue with flashlights, calling out for them to come down. Moments later, the police officers told Idris and other survivors to go back to the hill to avoid the probable return of the attackers. The officers also left the scene for the same reasons.
Mr. Idris admitted that over a hundred people used to sleep in the buildings every night by paying N200 weekly, but said nobody harboured arms there. The security man who used to rent out the building to them was very unfriendly and checked their rooms every morning.
Mr. Idris added that the soldiers that came to the building later in the day couldn't find any weapons there.
Meanwhile, the National Commercial Tricycle Owners and Riders Association of Nigeria, popularly known as the Keke NAPEP union, warned that it would embark on a mass protest unless the Federal Government pays N500m as compensation to the families of its members that were killed and injured during an operation by the State Security Service.
The Keke NAPEP union, which put the number of its members at one million nationwide and 100,000 in the Federal Capital Territory, warned of the planned mass protest in a set of demands it presented at the public hearing.
The SSS as well as the Inspector General of Police, shunned the public hearing.
In a testimony at the hearing, which was presided over by the Chairman of the Commission’s Governing Council, Prof. Chidi Odinkalu, the chairman of the FCT Chapter of the Keke NAPEP union, Alhaji Buba Gwoza, expressed regrets that months after the incident, no report had indicted those behind the killing of the squatters in the uncompleted building in Apo.
He therefore demanded that the Federal Government must immediately make a public declaration that the victims were innocent, and also pay N500m as compensation to their families.
The Keke NAPEP union in the same vein demanded the unconditional release of all their members that are still in detention.


Daily Trust