Crime
Igboho rejects Ilana Omo Oodua’s false hope, surrenders
While Sunday Adeyemo is throwing up his hands in frustration, and blasting his Beninese lawyers for collecting millions without getting him out of jail, his group Ilana Omo Oodua is looking on the brighter side.
It’s even making legal facts of that wishful thinking.
The National Daily reported how the Yoruba nation agitator, in a long rant and leaked phone conversation, has made up his mind for whatever happens next.
“My journey in life is between me and my God, I have accepted my fate where I’m currently. I’m not afraid of anything again, except my God. Even if taken before the Judge, I’ll tell him I’m not afraid of him except God. He can do anything to me,” Igboho said in the audio Sahara Reporters first reported.
And a subsequent phone conversation revealed how he dismissed his lead lawyer and professor David Salami Ibrahim.
“Are they lawyers,” Igboho said of the 10 Beninese lawyers he paid up N5 million each to defend him.
But the group that egged him on during his barnstorm across the southwest insisted his lawyers have buttoned up all preparations.
According to the spokesperson for the group, Maxwell Adeleye, Igboho’s legal team led by Olusegun Falola has prepared “everything necessary” to guarantee his release.
Igboho is facing charges of conspiracy to obtain travel documents, illegal migration, forgery, causing civil unrest, among others, in Benin.
Nigeria is also seeking to bring him back to face trial for stockpiling weapons.
The Beninese authorities clasped him jail as police wraps up its investigations.
Salami has fallen silent for months after his initial sabre-rattling in the media.
But Adeleye said Igboho could have been released had the judges not gone on vacation.
“They are expected to hear his case after the resumption and he should be freed. There was no vacation judge to hear the case. It is not like Nigeria where you have vacation judges,” he told the Punch on Sept. 7.