Popular human rights activist, Femi Falana (SAN) has proffered a possible explanation for alleged human rights abuses levelled against operatives of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) across the nation.
The lawyer said this while addressing calls for scrapping of the unit in an interview with Television Continental (TVC) on Wednesday morning.
He said, “SARS was actually created by the defunct military junta. It is made up of members of the mobile police unit and the armed forces.
“In other words, armed troops have been legally engaged since 1991 in the maintenance of law and order in our country. From my investigations, the killings are essentially carried out by those who have been trained to kill.”
However, Falana faulted the call to scrap the unit, saying that revamping the unit would make it better serve the nation’s purpose.
He added, “You must remove soldiers from SARS. Let me be honest with you, this system is not going to abolish SARS. They can’t abolish SARS. It’s not possible. There is no way you are going to abolish SARS under the present arrangement whereby you are going to have a field day for armed robbery suspects, kidnap suspects, slave drivers and human traffickers.
“At the police college, during training, police recruits are humiliated and dehumanised. By the time they come out, they want to have it back on the society that has degraded them.”
While condemning some activities of the unit, Falana said that it was simplistic to limit the corrupt activities in the Nigeria Police Force generally to the activities of SARS operatives.
He explained, “But you cannot single out the SARS from the general extortion by policemen and women, police stations in the country. For instance, it’s not just the armed SARS that is involved in these criminal actions. When armed robbery suspects are arrested, they are forced through unprecedented torture to make incriminating statements.
“The next stage is to parade them before the media. You don’t parade a big man but you parade the poor. In those press conferences, media men and women are allowed to subject them to cross-examination which shouldn’t be because we have court judgements, not less than five, which say that parade of suspects is illegal.”