The Rivers State Police command has been asked to apologize for the Tuesday attack on a Port Harcourt-based journalist, Kofi Bartels, by operatives of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS).
The police unit, notorious for extrajudicial killings and serial violation of human rights had beaten up, arrested and detained Mr. Bartels for capturing the brutal treatment of a young boy.
But the River State Council of the Nigerian Union of Journalists (NUJ) and the Institute for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (IHRHL) have demanded apologies from the state police command.
In separate statements, the two bodies have called on the Police to fish out and punish the SARS operatives who brutalized the journalist.
In a statement signed by the Secretary-General of the NUJ in Rivers State, Ike Wigodo, the union condemned in strong terms, the inhuman treatment meted out to Mr. Bartels.
The union deplored how the operatives beat up, handcuffed and arrested the journalist, regretting that a security agency paid to protect lives and property could turn itself into a monster to terrorize innocent citizens.
The union, therefore, demanded an unreserved apology from the Rivers State Police Command within 14 days or risk its activities boycotted by its members.
The Council also demanded that all the SARS officials involved in the brutal act be brought to book, while the agency foots the hospital bill of Mr. Bartels, who is currently receiving treatment in an undisclosed hospital
The statement further warned that further assault on journalists in the state would be vehemently resisted by the NUJ.
“NUJ as a watchdog of the society will not fold its arms and watch any arm of security agencies in the State descend to barbarism and brutalization of innocent citizens, let alone media practitioners. Enough is enough,” the statement warned.
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On its part, the IHRHL in a statement signed by its Acting Director, Mennenga King, said it received the news on the attack on Mr. Bartels with utter consternation.
The group described SARS operatives as, “The most odious species of law enforcement,” and called on the relevant authorities to fish out the criminal police officers and punish them based on the provisions of the law.
The IHRHL said the attack on Mr. Bartels narrowed the basis of his freedom and negates the principles of law enforcement and security.
In a bombastic style, the IHRHL indicated, “We have today, under SARS, a handful of men, free themselves, who execute the most base and abominable despotism over hundreds of their fellow creatures in Rivers State; that innocence should be the victim of oppression, that industry should toil for rapine, that the harmless citizens should suffer for crimes they did not commit, for failing to deliver extortions to gun-toting law enforcement officials.
“In other words, hundreds of fellow creatures should sweat, not for their own benefit but for the luxury and rapacity of tyrannical depredation – that indeed, these ordinary creatures gifted by Providence with the ordinary endowment of humanity should groan under a system of despotism unmatched in recent histories of law enforcement in the country.”
The group insisted that SARS must not be allowed to become “a mighty fabric of human bondage in Rivers State and Nigeria,” and prayed that the repressive reign of law enforcement would give way to responsible policing.
