The Police and the Department of State Service (DSS) on Friday openly disagreed over who has the authority to prosecute one Aminu Ogwuche, the man believed to have coordinated the April 14 bomb blast in Nyanya, Abuja.
At the Federal High Court, both the Police and the SSS laid claim to authority to prosecute the bomb suspect.
Justice Adeniyi Ademola, the judge who was assigned to handle the case, DSS ‘s lawyer, Cliff Osagie, urged the police to withdraw the initial charges filed against the accused to enable the DSS to complete its investigation on the matter.
But counsel representing the police, Oloye Torugbene, who is a Deputy Superintendent of Police, insisted that he would not withdraw the charges as he was not instructed by the police authorities to do so.
The charges before the court were filed by the police in preparatory to the Federal Government’s application for Ogwuche’s extradition from Sudan, where he allegedly escaped to after the incident.
However, the suspect was detained in the custody of the DSS upon his successful extradition to the country in July.
The matter was scheduled for arraignment before Justice Ademola on Friday, but the police who had filed the charges could not produce Ogwuche and his co-accused in court apparently because the suspects were not in their custody.
