Reported by: Ime Richard Aondofa | Edited by: Gabriel Osa
In the stillness of the early hours of 23 August 2021, the life of a young family was violently upended. At exactly 2:00 a.m., in Garki, Enugu, uniformed men stormed the residence of 27-year-old mother, Mrs. Ikechukwu, and her husband, Ikechukwu Henry, a caterer from Orlu, Imo State. What unfolded next was a chilling scene that has since become a grim pattern across the Southeast—individuals whisked away by those believed to be security agents, never to be seen again.
According to her testimony to Amnesty International, the men—between 10 and 15 in number—surrounded their compound before pounding on the door with the force that immediately awakened the nursing mother. Cradling her three-month-old baby, she opened the door only to meet a wall of military uniforms. Without explanation, she was pushed aside as the men stormed into the home.
Her husband, startled from sleep, was dragged outside and beaten mercilessly.
“They kept slapping him,” she recounted. “When I shouted, they threatened to beat me too.”
The search of their home yielded nothing incriminating. Yet the officers forced the couple—along with their infant—into a Hilux vehicle and drove them to the Nigerian Army 82 Division in Enugu. At the barracks, the young mother and her baby sat in the guardroom until morning, waiting, confused and terrified, as soldiers questioned her about her husband’s alleged links to IPOB—an accusation she insists holds no truth.
For three days, she was allowed to see him. Then suddenly, she was told he had been transferred to Abuja. No location. No officers’ names. No case file. No explanation.
Since that moment, she has never set eyes on her husband again.
More than four years later, her search continues—barracks to barracks, station to station, office to office—clinging to the hope that he is still alive somewhere, held incommunicado like many others whose families remain trapped in the cruel limbo of uncertainty.
The case of Ikechukwu Henry is not an isolated tragedy but part of a deeply worrying pattern of enforced disappearances, secret detentions, and unacknowledged arrests in Nigeria’s Southeast. Families are left without answers. Lives are shattered. Justice remains elusive.
As the calls for accountability grow louder, so does the demand that security agents reveal the whereabouts of those taken—men and women whose rights were extinguished in the dead of night without charge, trial, or trace.
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