Atiku Challenges Police Over Killing Of ABU Professor

Former vice president Atiku Abubakar on Sunday challenged the Nigeria police to provide a reasonable explanation of the circumstances that led to the murder of Prof Ahmed Falaki of the Ahmad Bello University, Zaria.

This was done in a statement by his media office in Abuja, the Nation reports.
The professor of Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) Zaria was killed after he had been mistaken for a Boko Haram insurgent.

Atiku Abubakar

The former vice president said the explanation given by the police on the circumstances that led to the death of Prof. Falaki is an embarrassment to the police.
According to him, the explanation that has been given so far on how Falaki died in police custody falls short of logical assimilation.

The statement read: “It is particularly distasteful and confounding that the police will confuse the identity of a personality such as Prof. Falaki as a member of the Boko Haram sect.

“In the manner that Prof. Falaki was killed, it is not in doubt that he had believed that the police station was a sanctuary of safety for him from the jungle justice he was receiving in the hands of locals, who had mistaken him for a member of the dreaded Boko Haram sect.

“That men of the Nigeria Police will stand and become witnesses to murder, and even allow the police station to become the theatre of jungle justice, is a very disturbing narrative about the circumstance in which Prof Falaki was killed.

“Such a narrative is an embarrassment to the professional integrity of the Nigeria Police and it is wholesomely unacceptable. The leadership of the Police must commission a thorough investigation into the circumstances in which Prof. Falaki was killed.”

Abubakar described the professor’s death as a huge loss to to the intellectual community in Africa.

Details of Falaki’s death are still sketchy. Initially, reports had it that the police had killed the victim believed him to be a militant. Soon the police said that Prof Falaki had been stabbed by a mob.

The Inspector General of Police Suleiman Abba has however ordered his Kano colleague to investigate the killing of Prof Ahmed Falaki.