I Lost Two Months Pregnancy To SARS’ Torture, Teacher Tells Panel
A school teacher, narrating to the panel how she was arrested in 2017 on an accusation of being a thief and a kidnapper. She said she was tortured by SARS men till she miscarried her two months old pregnancy at the time. She was detained and tortured for 22 days till she lost her pregnancy. She alleged that the policemen stole her husband’s N50,000 and compelled them to part with N400,000 as bail fee before they were freed.
Narrating their ordeal at the hands of the SARS men, she said, “On June 1, 2017, i received a text message from an unknown number that i had a parcel from DHL. A caller using different numbers asked for my home or office address and i gave him my school address upon my husband’s advice. The following day, i saw a black utility vehicle with huge men inside it. One of them was in a in a DHL uniform. Immediately, they approached me, they started beating me. They said i should get into the vehicle. They said I was a thief and an armed robber. The one in the DHL uniform removed it. My headmistress was peeping at us. I said ‘let me tell her and they said no. “I said my kid is there, they said no, that i should follow them, that my kid should die there. My headmistress came to the gate, they pointed a gun at me. She asked them what was going on, they said, “This woman is a thief, a kidnapper. She must follow us and go.’ They said they were police, SARS. “They pushed me inside the car and moved. The men were slapping, beating me. I was two months pregnant. I started vomiting. They kept torturing me. “They took me to their office at Ikeja. They took me to a shrine. They hanged me and beat me. During the beating, i urinated on my clothes. They said they would force my baby out of me. They said i must produce the person or die there.” The school teacher said after a long search for her at different police stations, her husband eventually located her but was immediately arrested and also locked up. She said, “Immediately they saw him, they started beating him. They put a tyre on his head, and said they would burn him alive. They started interrogating him, beat him with the butt of a gun, they hit him on the head with a stone. The school teacher said she and her husband later sued the police for rights violation and Justice Mohammed Idris then of the Federal High Court in Lagos ordered the police to pay them N2m in damages. She said they also won an appeal in 2020 but the police refused to obey the court order. The panel said it would summon the accused policemen to respond to the allegations.