Half-naked women from the home village of the activist and publisher of Sahara Reporters, Mr. Omoyele Sowore, in Kiribo, Ese-Odo Local Government Area of Ondo State, Nigeria, on Thursday stormed the Federal High Court premises in Abuja to protest the continued illegal detention of their son by Nigeria’s Department of State Service (DSS).
Many of the women who were more than 30 in number, were decked in white wrappers and bra but with no clothes covering the rest of the top parts of their bodies.
Mr. Sowore and his co-detainee, Adebayo Bakare, were produced in court on Thursday, with the judge, Justice Ijeoma Ojukwu, ordering the DSS to release them from the illegal detention within 24 hours.
Their trial on charges of treasonable felony was scheduled to commence on Thursday but the court had to adjourn till Friday due for report of compliance with the fresh order for the defendants’ release.
The protesting women who arrived in the court environment after the proceedings started on Thursday, were not allowed entry into the court premises.
But they stayed by the gate brandishing their placards with various inscriptions calling for Sowore’s release and only departed long after the proceedings had ended and Sowore with his co-detainee returned to custody by the DSS operatives.
In their Apoi dialect the women, many of them with grey hair, described themselves as beneficiaries of Sowore philanthropic gestures and appealed to President Muhammadu Buhari to release their son from custody.
