How Nigerian Secret Police, DSS, Raided Our Home, Arrested My Parents For Allegedly Aiding IPOB —Sunday Ifedi’s Daughter

Merit Ifedi, a Nigerian woman, has explained that she has been unable to reunite with her parents – Sunday Ifedi and Calista Ifedi – since they were apprehended by agents of the Department of State Services (DSS) in November 2021.

According to Merit, her parents were arrested for allegedly aiding members of the separatist group, the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB).

In the video of an event to mark the 2023 International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearance, which was uploaded by human rights activist Omoyele Sowore on X (formerly Twitter), the young Ifedi said that DSS officers stormed their Enugu home one early morning and claimed to be seeking something that their tracker suggested was inside the Ifedis’ house.

She said, “DSS raided our home and abducted my parents. I’m their first daughter and I have two other siblings. So on that day, it was around 4 am in the morning, they came to our house, knocking and banging on the door. So my dad woke up. He started waking all of us up.

“He thought they were robbers. So he was like ‘Stay inside, let me check what is going on’. So he saw them fully armed and he said ‘What sort of thing is this?’ And then they said, ‘Open the door, open the door’. He said we should stay inside, and that he would find out what was going on. So he asked them to come through the back door. They asked why would they come through the back door and said he should open the front door. He said the front door was locked and that they should come through the back. And our dog was at the back of the entrance. So as they came through the entrance, the dog started barking.

“They said if the dog made another sound, they would shoot it. We asked what was going on. They said ‘Open the door, open the door.’ Then my dad opened the door and said ‘How may I help you?’ They said, ‘We are here in search of something, when we find what we are looking for, you will know’. They came with a tracker, they said he should call everyone out. So my daddy decided to call all of us out. They said we should bring out phones. They said we should dial a number. We dialed the number. They looked at our phones, they said the number was not there. We kept asking for what they were looking for. They said they were there with a tracker and that we would know that what they were looking for.”

She said the DSS operatives at this point asked her mother to bring out her phone and insisted on searching through it.

She continued: “They asked my mum where her phone was and she gave them. But they said there was another phone and that the one she gave them was an old phone that she was no longer using. She decided to bring it out and started charging it, we were there waiting. They did not allow us to call anyone or make any calls; they pointed guns at us. So she brought the phone out. They looked at the phone. They said ‘It is here’. She was asking what it was. ‘What are you talking about?’ she asked. They did not even give her any information about what they saw or anything. They said they should come with them to the station. She asked, ‘For what reason?’

“We asked what they were going to do, where they were taking her to, who they were but they did not even talk. They just pointed guns at us and said we should stay inside and lock the door.

“As they moved out, the last person that was there left the door, and we ran outside. We saw about two Prado SUVs and 10 Hilux vehicles leaving our compound. My siblings started shouting. What is going on? Elders started coming out. They were asking what happened. Before we knew what was going on, they had already left. People were now asking us who those people were, we said we didn't know. As we described them, they said it was DSS. But they came with soldiers and all of them were armed.”

She revealed that since her parents were taken away to an unknown location, the DSS had denied family members and other interested persons the chance to see them.