Emmanuel was arrested for tweeting that he would "pay a Russian sniper to eliminate Buhari and Kyari",
Solomon Akuma, the father of Emmanuel Akuma, a pharmacist, who has reportedly been detained by the Force Criminal Investigation Department (FCID) in Abuja for about nine months, has narrated to PREMIUM TIMES how the police ‘deceived’ him to get his son arrested.
The father, who is a senior pastor at the Truevine Evangelical Mission based in Delta State, said his son, a pharmacist intern with the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), was arrested on April 2, 2020, in Aba, Abia State.
The 29 years old Emmanuel was arrested for tweeting that he would “pay a Russian sniper to eliminate Buhari and Kyari”, apparently referring to President Muhammadu Buhari and his then Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari, who later died of complications attributable to COVID-19 later in the year.
The tweet was in response to a Twitter post asking respondents what their next move would be if they got $1 million.
The father said he thereafter received a call from a person ”who disguised to be a person seeking to reward him for praying for him in the past.”
“It was me they used as bait to get to my son. They used me as their link. Someone must have dug up my profile and they found out that I was a pastor,” he said.
The cleric added, “Someone called me that I had prayed for him at a place. He said he wanted to honour me and that he and others would be coming on a particular date.
“They also said that they would visit me and give me an honorarium. I said I was not really aware of what they were talking about.
“They said I should not bother that they knew me as a pastor. I said, okay, no problem. They said I had once ministered in their church.
“I was not around at the time because I went for burial in my hometown. So I lodged in my in-law’s place.
“I said no problem, but something ministered to me that those guys were not what they said they were and as it turned out to be, they were policemen.”
He said he reluctantly agreed to meet with them and took them to his in-law’s place, where they “arrested everybody and collected all our phones at gunpoint, and marched us into a red jeep they parked outside.”
He said the policemen later used his phone number to call his son “telling him that his father lost the phone”.
“In fact, because of all the weapons they had I couldn’t react because I could not ascertain who they were,” he said.
The cleric said when his son arrived at the scene, the men immediately arrested him.
“So, at that point, they gave us back our phones, and they took him to the police station, down to Umuahia, to Enugu and the next day, they went to Abuja,” he said.
Detained
He said he initially took them for kidnappers until after two days when his son called to inform him that he had been detained at the FCID at Area 10 in Abuja.
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