The Department of State Services, or DSS, has been accused of disobeying a court order by Aloy Ejimakor, lead counsel to Nnamdi Kanu, the head of the Indigenous People of Biafra, or IPOB.

According to Ejimakor, the Abuja Federal High Court, presided over by Justice Binta Nyako directed Kanu to meet with his attorneys in a private chamber. However, DSS agents refused to comply. 

To prepare for his trial, Justice Nyako had given the secret police permission to let Kanu meet with five solicitors in a private room. 

He noted that the judge made the verdict on the “Order modifying the conditions of Counsel visitation to Mazi Kanu” on May 20, 2024. 

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According to Ejimakor, the purpose of the amended Order was to give Kanu’sKanu’s attorneys more time to “adequately prepare him for trial in a way that would ensure that he gets a fair trial. Accordingly, the Court ordered that Mazi Kanu be permitted (by the DSS) to meet with up to five of his Lawyers, consulting with him as a Team, not separately as was done before. And that such consultation be done in a “private room” at the State Security Services where Kanu is currently detained.”

In a statement he signed, Ejimakor said: “Consequently, after duly notifying the DSS with names of the four Lawyers billed to meet with Kanu today, the Lawyers timely presented themselves at the DSS earlier today to meet with Kanu as a group or together but the DSS refused, insisting that the Lawyers must meet with Kanu separately. To be sure, this is a flagrant disobedience of the Court order.

“This latest development affirms the point we have been making in Court that continuing to detain Kanu at the DSS constitutes a permanent hindrance to any prospect of getting a fair trial for him. This is the reason we had filed applications to either restore his bail, transfer him to prison custody or to home detention, but the Court refused all the applications.

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“Additionally, the room where the Lawyers were separately taken to meet with Kanu is an office of a senior officer of the DSS and hardly qualifies as a private room that is presumably free from any secret monitoring devices, which is the case with the interrogation room where Kanu previously met with his Lawyers.

“Further, the Court order gave leave to the Lawyers to enter with books and to take notes from briefings with Mazi Kanu but, in addition to disallowing team visitation, the DSS also disallowed our entry into the room with papers and collected our eye glasses, such that some of us could not read the provisions of the extant laws to which Mazi Kanu adverted us as crucial to preparing his defence.

“For the foregoing reasons, we have come to the only reasonable conclusion emanating from this anomalous situation, and that is: the prosecution which is pushing for an accelerated trial is either unserious or that it wants an accelerated kangaroo trial, lacking in any scintilla of fair play.”

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