July 19, (THEWILL) – Reports making the rounds indicate that Yoruba Nation agitator, Chief Sunday Adeyemo, popularly known as Sunday Igboho, may have been arrested in Cotonou, Benin Republic, by Nigerian security operatives.
Declared wanted by the Department of State Security (DSS) after the agency’s July 1 raid on his private home in Soka area of Ibadan in Oyo State, Igboho was said to have been nabbed on Monday night while making arrangements to fly out of Cotonou.
He may have put plans in place to sneak through Cotonou into Germany.
Some sources said he was already in Lagos preparatory to being flown to Abuja; others said he was yet to be transferred to Nigeria.
Two people had been killed by the security operatives with 13 others, including a lady, arrested and currently in the DSS custody on Igboho’s home.
The widely condemned raid, according to the DSS, unearthed a “cache” of arms, a claim that Adeyemo, from hiding, refuted as wild and untrue.
Even then, the DSS through its Public Relations Officer, Peter Afunnaya, advised Igboho to turn himself in to the nearest security.
Pelumi Olajengbesi, one of the lawyers representing Igboho and others arrested in the Ibadan home, could not confirm to a news medium the certainty of Igboho’s arrest in Cotonou.
Former presidential aide to former President Goodluck Jonathan, Reno Omokri, in deriding the reported arrest, vowed in a Facebook post that citizens would marshal funds to defend the Yoruba Nation agitator.
Omokri’s post reads: “The reported arrest of Sunday Igboho in Cotonou is unfortunate. He is a hero freedom fighter who defended us.
“We must now repay his good turn and also defend him and gather resources for his legal defence. Igboho deserves the same commitment from us that Buhari has shown and continues to show to killer herdsmen and bandits.
“Buhari has refused to categorise his kinsmen, who shot down a multimillion dollar Nigerian Air Force jet yesterday as terrorists (they lied that the jet did not crash, but the pilot survived and blew open their lies).
“Yet, he has criminalised one of the few Nigerians brave enough to stand up to killer herdsmen. And that is why I stand with Igboho. Not for secession. But for defending his people.”
In a four-point Monday Press Statement, the Oodua People’s Congress (OPC), through its President and successor to the Late Founder, Otunba Wasiu Afolabi, also known as “Askari,” placed a demand that security agents should call off the manhunt for Sunday Igboho and urgently release all those arrested in that “despicable July 1 raid on his Ibadan home.”
It credited Igboho with bringing sanity to the insecurity engendered by Fulani herdsmen, and lamented that “when the likes of Sunday Igboho organise themselves to defend the people, they are hunted down by state authorities” who do nothing to rein in the killing, kidnapping-for-ransom and raping spree of Fulani herdsmen.
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