EMANCIPATE NIGERIAN NOW ALSO PETITIONS HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION

Police Killing of Chief Onokpite in Delta State: Family Petitions Human Rights Commission

Ogbe Onokpite

The family of Chief Ogbe Onokpite, the candidate of the Citizens Peoples Party (CPP) in the Delta State 2007 and 2011 gubernatorial elections who died of police gunshot wounds on November 26, has appealed to the Executive Secretary of the National Human Rights Commission to commence a thorough investigation of the incident in order to bring to justice the policemen and officers responsible for it. In a statement signed by the bereaved family by Festus Keyamo, the Onokpite family also called for an urgent Coroners’ Inquest towards obtaining “the autopsy report and a full Criminal Investigation Report of the murder of an innocent citizen.”It would be recalled that a police report of the incident claimed that the late governorship candidate was in the process of purchasing arms in the hotel in which he was arrested and shot. Ibrahim Tsafe, the Delta State Commissioner of Police, said in an interview that Chief Onokpite ‘and his accomplices were ambushed by the police detectives who were deployed in the hotel from the Area Command of the Nigeria Police Force, Warri.” Chief Onokpite, he said, “was negotiating for arms in the hotel,” and that when he was coming down from the hotel, “we asked him to surrender but he declined to surrender, instead he confronted the police in company with his men”. Mr. Tsafe said that a gunfight then erupted in which Chief Onokpite was fatally injured, and “he died before help could get to him in the hospital”. On the contrary, the grieving Onokpite and Ighomrore families said in the statement that when the policemen arrived in Ogbe’s room, “he was immediately arrested and brought out (to the open still within the hotel premises) and shot in the leg.”
According to the statement, Chief Ogbe was then taken in a police to the Police Station in Warri “where he was again shot in other more delicate parts of his body and left thereafter to bleed to death.” The families said they sent a formal complaint to the Inspector-General of Police which was acknowledged by the office of the Inspector-General of Police on the 28th of November, but that the complaint has been ignored by the Inspector-General of Police despite their repeated follow-up through a legal counsel.  “This goes to show that the Police is protecting the persons behind the cold-blooded murder of Chief Ogbe Onokpite,” the family claimed.  Channelstv Big Story on the murder of Ogbe Onokpite