Fifty-two-year-old mother and evangelist, Victoria Agori, whose 21-year-old son, Daniel Agori, was shot in her presence on May 11, 2019, by cops attached to the IG Police Monitoring Unit in Rivers State, speaks about the refusal of the Nigeria Police to release her son’s corpse four years after he was killed.
It has been four years since men of the Nigeria Police shot and killed your son in right in your presence. Looking back, how do you feel and have you recovered from that excruciating incident?
I’m not feeling fine. I’m not even close to being fine because I’ve not seen my son’s dead body since he was shot in 2019. He haunts me in my dreams, where he has continued to insist that justice must prevail in his matter and that his corpse should be released in order to be buried. Recently, I slumped and fell in the market which gave me a wound.
Family members were called to come and carry me when I slumped at the Rumuokoro market. I’ve been a shadow of myself since watching him being shot right in my presence four years ago.
As a woman and a mother, I feel depressed whenever I remember what the police did to me.
I won’t lie to you; I always feel sad. I shed tears and I’ve not been able to sleep well in the last four years due to the depression I have been passing through. The incident is engraved in my mind and can’t be forgotten. Even family members tried all they could to no avail. For instance, I could be having a different conversation or preaching and before you know it, my mind would go to the incident and you would notice a change in my mood. It has been traumatic for me. I still recall with sadness how they (policemen) molested me; they opened my legs and were playing with my genitals. It was not a good scene; this is over four years already. It happened May 11, 2019, and till today, I have not been able to get justice for my son.
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The panel that probed the extrajudicial killings of some Nigerians by the police ordered the release of your son’s corpse. Have the police not been compliant?
The panel asked them to release my son’s corpse to me, but they have failed to do so. Even my lawyer, who’s domiciled in Abuja, sent a junior lawyer in Rivers State to see to the release of my son’s corpse, but nothing good came out of it. Despite the huge amount of money that was spent to make that happen. We still got nothing from it. In fact, some workers at the University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital morgue where the policemen claimed they kept the body searched all the corpses, but they couldn’t find my son’s body. This means that the police have been lying all along; they didn’t even tell the panel the truth.
My appeal is that they should release my son’s dead body. It hasn’t been easy for me. I’m dealing with serious high blood pressure due to this incident. My BP is so high that I feel pain every day. Even my doctor recommended that I shouldn’t get angry and that my family should find a way to calm me down. I really need justice. Let the policemen involved be arrested and give me my son’s dead body to bury. After this time, if they (police) refuse to give me my son’s dead body to bury, I will go naked and walk on the road and in the market. I will go naked and be in the same form the day they stripped me naked and allowed their senior officers and Divisional Police Officer to see my naked body.
