PUNCH Newspapers has petitioned the Inspector-General of Police, Usman Baba, over the attack on one of its reporters, Tony Ufoh, by policemen attached to the Special Fraud Unit, Ikoyi, Lagos.
The PUNCH Editor, Ademola Oni, in the petition to the IGP on Thursday, condemned the “unwarranted, provocative, uncivilised, crude and barbaric attack” on the reporter.
PUNCH Metro had reported that Ufoh went to the SFU to speak with some prospective tenants allegedly defrauded by a developer, Adewale Tunde.
Ufoh was interviewing the victims in front of the station when he was approached by the policemen, who accused him of filming the SFU building.
The men thereafter seized his telephone and ID card.
All efforts to retrieve the items proved abortive, as the policemen deleted pictures of the housing scam victims in the reporter’s phone and threatened to lock him up.
Despite the intervention of the acting PUNCH Metro Head, Samson Folarin, who
spoke to one of the officers on the phone, the policemen refused to budge.
One of the officers said the SFU Commissioner of Police, Ibrahim Zango, approved of the attack on the reporter.
He said, “What warrant him (Ufoh) to come here and interview people? If he was doing his job, that was why we seized his phone, let him explain himself to the CP. The CP is on his way and he knows what is going on now.”
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The Editor, Oni, in the petition to the IGP, said attacks on PUNCH journalists by men and officers of the Nigeria Police Force had become frequent, as he charged the police boss to intervene and sanction the errant policemen.
The petition read in part, “I have the authority of the management of PUNCH Nigeria Limited to request that you use your good offices to direct that the errant policemen return the telephone set and the ID card of Ufoh to him at the corporate head office of PUNCH Nigeria Limited, PUNCH Place, along the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway in Magboro before 6pm today, December 30, 2021 to ensure fairness.
“We also demand that these overzealous policemen be punished for taking the laws into their hands by attacking an innocent Nigerian, obstructing a journalist from carrying out his lawful duty, and dragging the image of the Force in the mud through their crudeness and brazen display of their self-imposed power.”
But the spokesperson for the SFU, Eyitayo Johnson, who had earlier claimed ignorance of the attack, said the report was a ploy to whip up public sentiments.
Johnson, in a statement, said the reporter did not get approval from the office of the public relations officer before doing his job.
He was observed to be taking pictures of personnel and visitors to the unit, video-recorded the activities within the unit for (close to an hour) and even conducted interviews of complainants in a case under investigation.
“All these were done without obtaining authorisation from the management of the unit or the simple courtesy of liaising with the office of the Public Relations Officer,” he added.
