MR Turner Ogboru, fingered by Delta State government as the man through whom the “police final report” on the James Onanefe Ibori ex-convict saga was released, has denied the allegation, describing it as diversionary to the trial by the Federal High Court Abuja to establish the identity of the James Onanefe Ibori that was convicted.
Ogboru, brother to Chief Great Ogboru, Ibori’s main rival in the 2003 gubernatorial election in Delta State, spoke Friday in Lagos. Delta State Government had through a two-page statement issued by the governor’s special assistant on media relations, Mr. Abel Oshevire, last Tuesday, said “despite the hue and cry by the police over the so-called final report which has the insignia of the inspector-general of police, Mr. Tafa Balogun, the one finally released via Mr. Turner Ogboru who has turned the police in Abuja to the second home, are the same.
Turner Ogboru said that it was strange that Delta State government was trying to link him with a matter he knew nothing about. “I do not live in Abuja but in Lagos.
I have not seen the inspector-general of police, Mr. Tafa Balogun or the director of the State Security Service (SSS) before. So I find it curious that Delta State Government is saying what at best is the figment of its imagination,” he told journalists.
Querying the use of the state government machinery to respond to issues relating to the James Onanefe Ibori ex-convict saga “when in actual fact it is strictly Governor Ibori’s private affair,” Turner Ogboru said the statement released by Oshevire was “nothing but a sterile fight by Governor James Ibori against the SSS, the police and myself.”
He wondered why Governor Ibori and his aides continued to make issue out of the police reports when, according to him, court records concerning the ex-convict saga were the relevant documents to the on-going trial and not the police reports.
“Apart from the court record book, no other book is known to the Evidence Act to verify, ascertain and confirm the veracity, validity and genuiness of claims that such proceedings and/or convictions took place at all. Any other material is extraneous and showed undue irrelevance and unknown to Nigerian Law of Evidence,” he pointed out.
He added: “It is therefore most unfortunate that a matter seized of by a competent court should be so lavishly and carelessly commented upon by Oshevire.”
“Such a tendencious, presumptuous and highly provocative assault on institutions of state, constituted authorities and private persons, without recourse to facts and truths is most unfortunate and condemnable,” he said in apparent reference to Oshevire’s claim that the police and the SSS erred in their reports of investigations into the Ibori ex-convict saga.
