Reverend King: Group urges for sentence commute

The Integrated Coalition for Human Rights, a nongovernmental organization, has urged Nigerians, the government and judiciary to have a second look at the death penalty conviction of the General Overseer of Christian Praying Assembly, Reverend Chukwuemeka Ezeugo alias King.

Speaking for the group, Dr. Raphael Umoren, described the Supreme Court judgment as travesty of justice.
According to Umoren, the trial, prosecution and eventual conviction by the Supreme Court fall short of all known legal procedure. He urged that death sentence be commute.
The coalition called for the immediate commute of the death sentence without any strings attached, with a view to not only ensuring that justice was done but, disabusing the minds of the general public over the entire trumped- up charges against King.
 Tracing back the genesis of King’s travails in 2006, Umoren said since the arrest of the clergyman, his arrest and other events had been fraught with excessive power and indiscretion by the police.
Umoren said: “It’s on record that the Special Anti-Robbery Squad team that invaded his house after the allegation, made away with over N5.5m church harvest without warrant. Even after he was arraigned at the Magistrate Court on a 2-count charge of conspiracy and attempted murder of seven members of his church, one of the female prosecution witnesses, conspired with police and slammed an assault suit against him inside the court room, while another witness said on oath that King never poured fuel on anybody. This was why she was not used at the trial in the high court.
“It’s also on record that some of the witnesses told the medical doctor at the clinic, where they were rushed to after the incident, that the deceased sustained the injury through generator accident. However, this was ignored by the trial judge who hinged his judgment on fabricated fallacies even when the deceased maintained in her statement that King was not at the scene of the incident.”
Umoren noted that one of the interested parties in the case, who earlier claimed that King abducted his wife, was on record as the first person that visited the deceased in the hospital, begging her to implicate King. According to Umoren, the man promised to fly her overseas for medical treatment, if she implicated the man of God, but she still declined.
“After her death, her two statements in police letter-headed papers disappeared and in its place, a full scape sheet was used to fabricate her statement. This is in spite of the fact that no police station recorded any case of murder against King,” said Umoren.