Reporter writes Human rights Commission over threat to life

 By Mariam  Hassan

After writing an SOS letter to the Police in May this year, on the threat to his life, a news correspondence yesterday, wrote the National Human Rights Commission of Nigeria (NHRC), over the incessant threat.

The reporter who requested to keep his name anonymous for fear of being queried by his employers, who he claimed will not be comfortable with his simultaneous attacks on the Federal Government,  Boko Haram and more recently, the killer herdsmen, noted that his life ‘was hanging on a tread’.

In the letter, the tormented reporter with over a decade experience narrated how his house was invaded and set ablaze in Festac Town, Lagos in May this year, physical attack on him in November 2017, five letters on threat to his life between April and July from terrorist groups, attack on him at the State Chapter of the Coalition of Nigerian Civil Society Organizations’s (CNCS)  Annual  Conference in Adamawa State in February 2018 and over fifty of telephone call threats.

The attack by three knife wielding men at the CNCS  Conference, brought to the fore, the constant threat to the bankers life which resulted in him being hospitalized for days due to the injury sustained during his escape from his attackers.

It will be recalled that diehard assailants attacked some participants at the CNCS conference in February this year while the reporter was also present.

During the attack, the three knife brandishing attackers were shot while the reporter escaped with injuries.

The investigation of the attack is still inconclusive.

 In the petition Letter to Human Rights Commission,  the reporter that a threat letter was sent to him by terrorist organizations on the 15^th of May 2018, while his house was invaded a week after the after the threat.

He stated that since the past seven months, he has received over  thirty telephone calls from unknown people coercing him to stop writing and reporting.

According to him, when the telephone calls were getting too much and affecting him psychologically, he stopped picking most telephone calls, except the one that he knows.

This, he said, has impacted negatively on his productivity.

The reporter had sent a petition letter to the Lagos State Commissioner of Police and the Inspector General of Police in the first quarter of this year.