How I Lost Two-month Pregnancy to SARS’ Torture, Teacher Tells Panel

Hearing by the Lagos State Panel of Judicial Inquiry into complaints of human rights violations by men of the disbanded SARS continued on Saturday with a schoolteacher, Ndubuisi Obiechina, narrating to the panel how she was arrested in 2017 on an accusation of being a thief and a kidnapper.

Obiechina said she was tortured by SARS men till she miscarried her two-month-old pregnancy at the time.

The schoolteacher, who appeared before the Okuwobi-led panel alongside her husband, Ogechukwu, told the panel that she was detained and tortured for 22 days till she lost her pregnancy.

She named officers Phillip Rilwan, Christian and Haruna Idowu as some of her torturers.

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 sport utility vehicle with huge men inside it. One of them was 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 HM (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 would die there. My HM 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. That was when they found out I was pregnant. But they kept torturing me. I told them I did not know the suspect.

“They took me to their office at Ikeja. They took me to a shrine. They hanged me and beat me. They said they would force my baby out of me. They said I must produce the person or die there.”

The schoolteacher 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.

“During the beating, I urinated on my clothes; they said my pregnancy was not my husband’s, that I should bring the man who impregnated me.”

The schoolteacher 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 on 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.