Timeframe: 19 – 29 June 2021
Location: Private safe house outside JKIA, Gulfstream
G550, DSS Headquarters Abuja
Key Actors: Nigerian intelligence handlers, Kenyan
special police, UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention
Epigraph:
“He was chained to the floor for days, beaten, denied his medication,
and made to listen to the engines of departing aircraft.”
— Aloy Ejimakor, Affidavit of Facts on the Abduction of Nnamdi
Kanu, July 2021 [1]
The Camera Lens
After the basement ambush, Kanu expected the convoy to head for a police station. Instead it veered toward an unmarked compound on the outskirts of JKIA. Inside, a warehouse had been converted into holding pens: a concrete room with a single bulb, rings bolted to the floor, and a portable jammer humming to drown out phones. He was stripped, hooded, chained, and left in the dark. For ten days he existed off the books—no court entry, no consular access, only sedation, fists, and hunger. When the Gulfstream finally departed for Abuja, the prisoner could barely stand.
Court filings describe conditions more akin to a black site than a detention cell. He was blindfolded, cuffed, and chained to a drain so tightly that his ankles bled. Food arrived once a day in a plastic bowl; water was rationed [1]. A generator roared all night to mask his shouts. Guards were warned that any act of mercy—an extra sip of water, a loosened cuff—would land them in the same hole.
When the jet touched down in Abuja, a DSS medical log recorded arrhythmia, a heart murmur, bruised wrists, and dangerously low potassium levels [2]. A sworn statement from the attending physician—filed alongside Aloy Ejimakor’s affidavit—confirms that antihypertensive medication was withheld for at least forty-eight hours, triggering fainting spells during interrogation. These clinical notes are the only neutral proof of torture in the case file, yet they were never admitted into evidence. His body was a crime scene; the State treated it as contraband.
The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (Opinion No. 25/2022) concluded that Kenya and Nigeria violated Articles 2 and 3 of the Convention Against Torture by orchestrating an extra-legal rendition [3]. The opinion catalogues hooding, forced sedation, beatings, and denial of medical care as hallmarks of torture. Kenya has ratified CAT; Nigeria domesticated it through the 2017 Anti-Torture Act. By relocating due process to an anonymous warehouse and a chartered jet, both states breached their obligations—and signaled that dissidents could be disappeared without judicial oversight.
The “interception” narrative collapses under the weight of medical charts and treaty citations. What happened in those ten days was not an arrest; it was an enforced disappearance. Every scar, every skipped heartbeat, every withheld tablet is an exhibit against two states that chose brute force over law.