The sixty lawyers who have approached the Federal High Court sitting in Abuja to commence committal proceedings against the Director General of the State Security Service (SSS) for disobedience to court order on the continued detention of Mr. Godwin Emefiele, have accused the organisation of threatening to frame them with terrorism and referring to them as Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and the Eastern Security Network (ESN) lawyers.
The consortium of lawyers, in a media briefing in Abuja, led by Mr. Tijani Ahmed, following a viral tweet by the DSS on their official tweeter handle in reaction to the processes they filed, said the security agency is planning to frame them up as terrorists.
In the tweet, the DSS was quoted as having written the following, “Charge and bail, overzealous uninformed IPOB/ESN lawyer Maxwell Okpara mobilises other like-minded lawyers against DGSS. Futile Efforts. Well, Nigerians, beware! This is in bad faith. Transferred aggression.
A Biafran Republic agitator and outlawed IPOB counsel defending the suspended CBN governor. Is IPOB defending one of theirs???? What a contradiction….hmmm… what’s the connection? May Maxwell be properly educated on points of law, please.”
The lawyers claim that the tweet had now gone viral stating that, “at about 6am when we met this morning, the tweet was still there on the handle of the SSS. This was about 17 hours after it had been posted and had really gone viral. At that time, it had been seen by about 2 million people globally, generated over 3600 comments, retweeted almost 5000 times, and liked more than 2500 times.
The tweets, which have been greeted by national outrage and condemnation are still on the handle of the security agency.
Furthermore, the lawyers, whilst expressing their trauma following the tweets, listed several cases of disobedience to the Court order against Mr. Bichi involving Igbo people and asserted that Mr. Bichi must have been suffering from what they termed ‘Igbophobia’.
“In the same vein, the tweet by the SSS has also exposed it very clearly to the world that the persecution Mr. Godwin Emefiele suffers today is largely due to the ethnic profiling as directed by the DG SSS.
“The fact that Mr. Emefiele is Igbo and attained the height of CBN Governor to Mr. Bichi is an abomination hence his resolve to see that Emefiele is pulled down because, to him, all Igbo are IPOB/ESN Terrorists,” the lawyers said.
Mr. Tijani also said it seems clear that Mr. Bichi has declared war on lawyers and the Igbo people and that the persecution being suffered by Emefiele is largely due to ethnic and political reasons, asserting that it could not be a coincidence that several cases involving Igbo people were being serially disobeyed by the DG DSS.
The lawyers thereafter called for the sack of Mr. Bichi from office for what they termed manifesting open hatred against an ethnic group. They also alleged that the attitude of the DG DSS would tarnish the image of President Bola Tinubu and thanked the public for the overwhelming condemnation that trailed the tweet.
The lawyers resolved to write to the UN, EU, UK, and US governments, the President, CJN, and NSA and also approach the court for the enforcement of their rights.
