Alive After 5 Years in Hell”: How DSS Arrested Innocent Igbo Woman in Onitsha and Buried Her Alive in Wawa Detention

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“Alive After 5 Years in Hell”: How DSS Arrested Innocent Igbo Woman in Onitsha and Buried Her Alive in Wawa Military Detention In a heartbreaking scene that has once again exposed the dark underbelly of Nigeria’s security apparatus, Onyeaka Ozioma Elizabeth, an Igbo woman from Anambra State, was spotted trembling in the premises of the Federal High Court, Abuja, after more than five years and three months of secret detention. According to Barrister Nnaemeka, who encountered her at the court, Ozioma was arrested by operatives of the Department of State Services (DSS) at 33 Onitsha, Anambra State, over five years ago. Without any formal charge explained to her family, without access to a lawyer, and without a single phone call home, she was whisked away and dumped in the notorious Wawa Military Detention Centre in Kainji, Niger State a place far removed from everything she has ever known. When Barr. Nnaemeka contacted the phone number Ozioma managed to provide, her own sister could not believe she was still alive. It took a video of Ozioma’s haunted face for the family to accept that the woman they had long mourned as dead had been kept in military custody all these years. “See the fear written all over her face,” Barr. Nnaemeka said. “Brought from Anambra to Kainji, then to Abuja, towns and cities she has never been to in her life to face a trial she does not understand. What manner of justice can come from such illegal and dehumanizing detention?” Ozioma’s ordeal is not an isolated tragedy. It fits into a disturbing pattern in which Nigerian security agencies particularly the DSS and military have repeatedly arrested ordinary Igbo citizens, often on vague or unproven allegations of “Biafran sympathy,” and thrown them into distant military facilities without due process. Wawa Military Detention Centre in Kainji has become synonymous with prolonged, incommunicado detention. Families are left in agonising uncertainty for years. Lawyers are denied access. Courts are only approached after the damage has already been done. No citizen has ever been dragged across the country and locked away for years simply for identifying as Oduduwa or Arewa. Yet for many Igbos, merely being from the South-East appears enough to justify secret arrests and indefinite captivity. While the fight against genuine security threats is legitimate, the methods currently employed by Nigerian security agencies are self-defeating and unconstitutional. 1. Prolonged detention without charge or access to lawyers violates the Nigerian Constitution and international human rights standards. Holding anyone especially civilians with no proven violent record for over five years in a military facility without family contact is not “security.” It is state sponsored cruelty. 2. Transporting an Anambra woman to a remote military camp in Niger State serves no investigative purpose. It is designed to break the spirit, isolate the detainee, and intimidate the community. When security agencies appear to treat Igbo identity itself as a crime, they fuel the very resentment and alienation they claim to be fighting. Selective justice is no justice at all. Ozioma’s haunted face should haunt the conscience of every security official and policymaker in this country. A nation that disappears its own citizens for years and then suddenly produces them in court like forgotten cargo has lost the moral authority to speak of justice. Nigeria cannot continue to treat innocent Igbo citizens as disposable. The rule of law must apply equally or it applies to no one. Family Writers Press International.