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Uchechi Okwu-Kanu, the wife of the embattled Radio Biafra director, in the interview granted to the IBTimes UK speaks about the detention of her husband. The woman expressed concern over the continued custody of the Biafra leader. She said: “Nnamdi is just a prisoner of conscience. He has been held nearly for two months already. He’s been
held extra-judicially. And that is not right.”
Mrs. Okwu-Kanu added that she is afraid of her husband’s well-being and supposed he was being tortured by the Nigerian state security service. “He was obviously dying. And there was no medical attention or anything like this,” Kanu’s wife added. The woman said that she had been able to speak with her husband only once since he was arraigned by the DSS as he traveled to Nigeria from London in the beginning of October.
She cautioned that Kanu’s health is worsening as he is no longer able to take medicine for “his life-threatening ulcer”. Okwu-Kanu defended her husband’s struggle for independence and argued pro-Biafrans have the right to self-determination. “The man I saw was not my husband anymore. He gradually becoming a ghost. So I can feel his pain. If you know somebody, when you look at him you see his pain,” she said.
Kanu’s wife also advised the Nigerian authorities to release her husband and engage in dialogue rather than arresting people “who agitate for freedom”. “Kanu must be released because he hasn’t done anything wrong. This is a very very serious case.” In the last part of the interview Okwu-Kanu stated that she needed her husband and mentioned about her eight-old pregnancy, noting that it’s not public thing. However, these claims could not be independently confirmed at the time of publishing this report.