Bruce Fein, the American counsel for detained Nnamdi Kanu, has told an Igbo socio-cultural organization in Nigeria, Ohanaeze Ndigbo, to ‘speak out publicly against the travesty of justice that daily inflicts great misery on the Biafran people’.
POLITICS NIGERIA reports that in a letter dated May 31st, addressed to George Obiozor, Ohanaeze’s President-General, Fein said “silence is not acceptable”.
Kanu, a British citizen who leads the banned Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), has been in detention since June 2021. He was arrested in Kenya and has since been confined in the facilities of the Department of State Services (DSS) in Abuja.
IPOB, which Kanu founded in 2014, is pressing for the secession of a part of southeast Nigeria where the majority of the population belongs to the Igbo ethnic group. Authorities view IPOB as a terrorist group. IPOB says it wants to achieve independence through non-violent means.
An attempt by Igbo separatists to secede as the Republic of Biafra in 1967 – the year that Kanu was born – triggered a three-year civil war that killed more than 1 million people.
On May 30, Fein had written on his known Twitter handle: “Ohanaeze and President General Obiozor are Missing In Action (MIA) in demanding the release of MNK, one of their own, from indefinite solitary confinement by a terrorist Fulani government. They should be thundering like a hammer on an anvil. Silence from professed Biafran leaders is unacceptable.”
