In this interview with Sahara Weekly, Kalu Ikeagwu narrated the ordeal he and his family recently went through in the hands of the Nigerian police force. Read below:
“Yesterday, 26th of September 2016, at about 3:40pm my daughter had just
been dropped off at home by her official school bus while I opened
the gate for her to come into the house, two men accosted and
ordered that I should follow them, then I asked them who they are,
instead they flashed an Identity card that I only showed police
written on it without any name. Meanwhile, these two men were in plain
clothes and one of them had a black looped earring . At this point, I
said I was not going to follow them since I do not know who they are.
Suddenly a white unmarked bus pulled –up in front of me and four more
men on plain clothes appeared from the bus with one pointing an AK47
raffle at my fore head …” Sensing danger, the actor smartly dialled his
wife’s phone number but the men began struggling his phone from him,
before they took the phone from him he was able to tell his wife that
“ some men purported to be police officers are taking me away…”
The men over powered and handcuffed him while they drove to Pen-cinema
Police station Agege, Lagos State. They drove passed area G Police
Station Ogba which is closer to Kalu’s residence. Arriving at
Pen-cinema Police station, they held him outside the gate; until a man
appeared wearing a black long coat who simply identified himself as
Born Great Benin. “I said to him I cannot answer any question from
you, unless I am taken into the police station proper, it was this
Born Great Benin that later ordered them to take off the cuffs and
asked them to bundled me into the bus again and they drove off to
somewhere I later identified as area F, police station Ikeja. At this
area F rather than take me into the station’s main building, I was held
at a room when a certain gentle man identified as Deputy Superintendent
of Police (DSP) Philips came in and showed me a telephone number and
asked if I knew the owner of the number…”
Instantly, Ikeagwu identified the owner of the number as his friend
who had picked him up from the airport a few days earlier. Ikeagwu
inquired from his friend if he had bought a phone recently and his
friend said yes and narrated how he had swapped his old
phone(ipone6) for a new one(Iphone7) at the popular computer village
Ikeja, Lagos Nigeria and paid an extra N37.000 in a legal business
transaction with a phone dealer. “That was when they explained to me
that since I was the last person that dialled my friend’s phone number
it made me a soft target-hence my arrest ”.
Ikeagwu’s friend who had travelled has since returned to Lagos, at
the time of publishing this story Kalu Ikeagwu is a free man while his
friend in company of a lawyer are working with the Nigerian Police
Force to identify the phone dealer.
Asked what this experience has done to his family and his personal
feelings towards the Nigerian Police, the graduate of English Language
had this to say:
“first I will talk about my wife, she is still in fear even till this
moment she even stopped me from jogging this morning . I thank God at
the way she handled the situation, the situation has made me remember I
have a gift in her. For me, it only reminded me of what a movie director
in Enugu told me, he said, he can forgive a man that takes away his
wife, or a man that stabs him so long as he did not die, but can never
lift a finger to help a dying police man. In my life I have never had
dealings with the police but it’s unfortunate the way this episode
ended. Because their actions are an embarrassment to Nigeria’s image,
the first skill of every intelligent police officer is his
understanding of psychology but instead they chose to do otherwise”.
From the press perspective; Kalu is disappointed at two media houses
and wishes to thank them for not having recourse to hear from him
before publishing their stories on this issue.
“But when I wedded they had the time to call me and report it, but when
this issue came up they forgot to call me, later remembered to call
me after they had publish their stories with my private home address
knowing how susceptible my family will be to miscreants and exposing me
to the public unnecessarily” he concluded.
