July 27, (THEWILL) — The story of Gospel Uebari Kinanee is the kind of stuff seen in horror movies and a sad reminder that the Nigeria Police Force still has within its rank and file officers whose conduct paints the Force as a refuge for scoundrels.
As the story goes, on July 17, 2025, Kinanee regained freedom from the Port Harcourt Maximum Correctional Centre, where he spent 18 years after he “vanished” from his Ogoni home at the age of 14. The police had pounced on him sometime in 2007 while resting on a bench at the family compound and dumped him in prison.
For his family members who were unaware of his arrest 18 years ago, Kinanee died and was lost after he had been declared missing following several failed attempts to find him. But on a routine visit to the correctional centre in September last year, a team from Haven Foundation, a Non-Governmental Organisation, were able to sense his queer behaviour and fished him out from a crowd of convicts.
Upon interrogation, the NGO found out that he had a peculiar case and pursued it to its logical conclusion. According to him, he was forcefully taken away by policemen allegedly invited by an influential neighbour for reasons he failed to understand.
On July 17, 2025, the Chief Judge of Rivers State, Justice Amadi set him free alongside 20 other inmates during a quarterly visit to the correctional centre in line with the provisions of the Criminal Justice (Release from Custody) (Special Provisions) Act, Cap C.40, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria 2004, and Section 34(1) of the Rivers State Administration of Criminal Justice Law No. 7 of 2015.
Justice Amadi, who noted that the judiciary, under his leadership, conducts quarterly visits to correctional facilities in a bid to address prison congestion also disclosed that the Port Harcourt facility, designed to accommodate 1,500 inmates, currently holds over 2,500 inmates.
However, Kinanee’s case may look like many other cases of awaiting trial suspects, ATS, as exemplified by two mentally ill inmates who had spent between eight and 10 years without trial at the Port Harcourt prison. But his case is peculiar. As the Haven Foundation found out in the intervening period before his release on clemency, he had no case file, no documentation of any kind. In fact, there was no record of him existing in the prison system. He was simply locked up at age 14 until he turned 32. That was when he regained his humanity.
Fortunately for him, the NGO, through diligent investigation, has been able to trace his kith and kin, who had lost all hope of seeing him alive again and reunited them.
This is not just a clear case of miscarriage of justice and equity but an assault on the enforcement of the rule of law. Keeping him as an ATS behind bars for over a decade is illegal and unconstitutional, more so when there were no records, documentation and case file on him.
We call on the Inspector-General of Police, Kayode Egbetokun to investigate this matter and sanction the officers involved, from those that physically removed Kinanee from his home on trumped up charges to the Divisional Police Officer or any superior officer in charge of those policemen.
This case is more than a scandal for the Nigeria Police Force. It is unimaginable that after many years of deliberate effort to clean the force of bad eggs, the Force still has within its ranks such dregs as those that unlawfully arrested a minor and denied him his childhood in a most horrible way through detention for 18 years.
We salute the Haven Foundation for their untiring efforts to unravel this case and bring it to a happy ending for the victim and his relatives.
