A fresh clarification has come from the Nigeria Police Force as the Assistant Inspector General of Police in charge of Zone 2, Olohundare Jimoh, insisted that the disbanded Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) no longer operates in any form within the force.
The senior police officer also rejected allegations that former SARS personnel were secretly reorganised into newly created tactical squads.
His remarks follow renewed public outrage sparked by viral videos showing confrontations between police officers and civilians, including the recent shooting of 28-year-old Mene Ogidi in Effurun, Delta State.
Speaking during an appearance on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily on Friday, Jimoh maintained that many of the clips currently circulating online are not recent incidents but old recordings dating back five or six years.
“The SARS has been disbanded, and there is no area where the Old SARS were migrated into another Squad or formation for them to do anything.”
According to the AIG, officers who previously served in SARS were not dismissed from the force because they remained regular police personnel performing general duties. Instead, they were reassigned to other departments after the unit was scrapped.
He explained that following the #EndSARS protests, the police carried out extensive reforms and retraining programmes aimed at improving officers’ conduct and respect for human rights. Jimoh added that several international organisations participated in the process.
“A lot of internal human rights organisations, including the Red Cross international, and others even participated in ensuring that we reshape the behaviour of all these personnel.
“While I was CP Lagos, the Red Cross was in my office to ensure that those people who were rehabilitated in terms of performing their duty and ensuring that they continue to respect human rights and dignity and their behaviour is in contact with members of the public, conform with the international best practices, so they were very debriefed”.
Addressing concerns over the resurfacing videos of alleged police brutality, the police chief said only the Delta incident involving Mene Ogidi appeared recent, while many others being reposted online were old cases.
“Eventually, all the videos that you are seeing online, outside the incident that happened in Delta, are extremely old videos, some of them dated to about 5 to 6 years ago, that people are now tagging as something that just happened.”
Jimoh disclosed that the Inspector-General of Police had already set up a high-powered committee to examine all the viral videos and establish whether any of them involved recent abuses by officers.
“If there is any recent case among them, those responsible will be identified and dealt with appropriately in line with the law,” he said.
The AIG also appealed to Nigerians to avoid spreading unverified information on social media, warning that false narratives could damage public confidence and affect national security.
“We want people to know that if you are helping the police force, then you are helping Nigeria. Whatever you put out should be based on facts,” the official stated.
He further urged members of the public to verify the authenticity of videos before reposting them, stressing that the police were not attempting to conceal legitimate cases of misconduct.
“We want people to ensure that before you move a video to another person, verify if they are true or not. There are quite a number which are rampant but happened 5 to 6years ago but we are not sweeping anything under the cParpet”, he added.