There was melodrama in Ebonyi State High Court premises, Abakaliki, on Friday afternoon when a lawyer, Sunday Ununu, disrupted proceedings during arraignment in Magistrate Court 1 in the high court premises.
Ununu, the principal of Bigbird Chambers in Abakaliki, left the duck where he was arraigned for alleged murder, alleging that the charges against him were not properly entered.
This happened after three attempts to arraign the lawyer this week in Magistrate Court 1, presided over by Ojemba Isu Oko, which all failed.
The popular lawyer had been in police custody in the police headquarters, Abakaliki, for about two weeks now after the bullets he fired from a pistol in his possession hit a 36-year-old orphan, Nnamdi Nwite, when Izzi Unuphu, the land power attorney, was celebrating their election for the new executives of the group.
The drama, which lasted for about two hours, disrupted court proceedings in other magistrate courts within Magistrate Court 1, where he was arraigned.
After the drama, Ununu was taken out of the court in a branded black police operational vehicle to the police headquarters by armed policemen who brought him to the court while the magistrate couldn’t sit on the matter.
Ununu had a grated interview with some journalists after walking out of the dock, but the policemen came to the two journalists, Wilson Okereke of The Sun and others, seized their phones and deleted the interview as recorded in the phones.
Meanwhile, a right-wing group, the Civil Liberty Organisation (CLO), has petitioned Inspector General of Police Kayode Egbetokun, seeking the transfer of the case file to force headquarters in Abuja.
CLO, in a statement signed by Kindness Jonah of the Enugu unit of the organisation, alleged that some disgruntled members of the extended family of the deceased were chimerically insinuating clandestine settlement with some members of the state police command who are in the know of the notorious incident and are now trying to circumvent justice by liaising for a quantifiable settlement without due process.
“Barrister Sunday Ununu should be made to face the full weight of the law for callously cutting short the enterprising life of Mr. Nnamdi Ugo Nwite and for even trying ‘‘settling’’ with distant relatives of the wasted blood without any modicum of regard for the nuclear family with an aged mother, certainly due to their excruciating poverty level,” the petition read in parts.
The petition was copied to Governor Francis Nwifuru, the state commissioner of police, the family of Nnamdi Nwite, and the National Human Rights Commission, among others.
When contacted, the state police public relations officer, DSP Joshua Ukandu, dismissed the insinuations that the command was planning to cover the matter.
“How can we cover the matter? Is he not in our custody? On this issue of his arrangement, I don’t have the details. For now, I don’t know anything about that, but I know he has been in our custody,” he said.