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A video has surfaced on the internet showing a policeman brutally assaulting a man in the middle of a road.
The incident was said to have happened on Sunday at Emouha junction, East/West Road in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital.
The officer and his colleagues were not in approved uniforms but were armed.
In the video, one of the officers was seen assaulting the man with a stick before slapping him repeatedly.
He was subsequently forced to enter a vehicle.
The officers were obviously not aware that their actions were being filmed.
In another viral video, one other officer forcefully pushed other passengers to their car and cocked his gun.
When contacted, the spokesperson for the state police command, Grace Iringe-Koko, condemned the assault and called on the victims to officially report the incident so that they can get justice.
She said, “I have seen the video but I am yet to ascertain what actually happened whether it was really Emouha or not. I have already sent the video to our platform for the officers to be identified and have asked that the person or persons that were assaulted should come to the office and see me so that I can get more facts and details.
“There is no official report; I only saw it on Twitter handle.”
Cases of police brutality are rampant in Nigeria, Africa’s largest democracy.
Youths narrate on social media daily have they were assaulted or extorted by police personnel or narrate accounts of someone who experienced such.
As decades of torture, maiming and killing by the country’s security forces stacked up, young people across the country took to the streets for days, beginning on October 8, 2020.
The target of their anger was the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a rogue police unit accused of extrajudicial killings, extortion and kidnapping among other nefarious crimes.
Tagged #EndSARS, the protests ballooned into a massive call for the abolition of the squad. It ended around October 20, 2020, after soldiers reportedly opened fire on unarmed protesters at a popular landmark – the Lekki tollgates – in the commercial capital Lagos.
However, three years after this protest, brutalities by the security operatives are yet to stop.
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