TheCable

Ahmad Gumi, a Kaduna-based Islamic scholar, has asked the Department of State Services (DSS) to either charge Tukur Mamu, publisher of Desert Herald, to a court or release him from detention.

Mamu, an aide to Ahmad Gumi, a popular Islamic cleric, negotiated the release of persons abducted on a train to Kaduna in March 2022.

According to Daily Trust, Gumi said this during his weekly preaching at Sultan Bello Mosque on Saturday.  

The cleric implored the secret service to take the publisher to court to face trial, adding that keeping him in custody is intimidating to his family.

“Take him to court to face trial. Keeping him in custody despite being a family man was just to intimidate him. This intimidation is also terrorism. Arresting people unjustly is also terrorism; just like the terrorists do by going to somebody’s house to kidnap him,” Daily Trust quoted Gumi as saying.

“How can we continue in this situation under a government that is about to wind up? Our hope is for them to finish successfully not in a bad light. It’s not about Tukur Mamu, you all know that whenever they arrest innocent people, I always talk, not to talk of someone that I know and I’m only advising the government to release him so that we can apologize to him to forget what happened.”

On Wednesday, Mamu was arrested at the Kano international airport after he returned from Egypt, where he was detained on his way to Saudi Arabia for lesser hajj.

On Thursday, the DSS said security operatives found incriminating materials like military accoutrements and large amounts of different currencies in Mamu’s house and office.

In a statement published in Desert Herald, his family said the military accoutrements belong to Mamu’s nephew, who passed out from the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA) in 2019.