Some policemen attached to the Special Anti-Cult Unit of the Anambra State Police Command have reportedly brutalised a female student of the Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka.
The men were accused of breaking into a private hostel housing students in a bid to arrest suspected fraudsters in Ifite, in the Awka South Local Government Area of the state.
However, during the process, the policemen, who were said to be heavily armed, allegedly beat up a naked female student around 4 am on Sunday.
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A resident, who gave his name only as Benneth for security reasons, said the policemen brutalised some of the students when they denied knowing any fraudster.
Benneth said:
“The hostel is called Prince Godwin Lodge, and it is outside the school. What we gathered was that there had been robbery operations in the area. So, on Sunday, the students started to hear bangs on the gate and doors of the hostel.
“The undergraduates thought the people banging the door were armed robbers because of what happened in the past and they raised the alarm. It was when they entered after breaking the doors of some flats that the students realised that they were policemen as they wore jackets with the inscription of SPAC.
“The students said the policemen started harassing them and said they were looking for Yahoo boys. One of the students, a girl, said some of the policemen entered her room and threatened her to name the boys in the hostel doing Yahoo Yahoo (Internet fraud). The policemen beat her, took some of the students’ phones, laptops, and televisions and arrested some of them. But the girl was able to use her mobile phone to record them as they left the hostel with the students.”
The victim while narrating her ordeal in a video clip recorded by some aggrieved students of the institution stated that the policemen beat her while she was naked.
She said:
“They broke the door and came into my flat and ever since they broke the door, if we want to sleep, we usually use a chair to brace the door at the back. This is where they were beating me and I was naked.”
In the video, injury marks were seen on her hand and her room was also observed to be scattered as the cupboard was wide open.
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