Senator Elisha Abbo
Senator Elisha Abbo
Senator Elisha Abbo representing Adamawa North Senatorial District who is in the eye of a storm for attacking and beating up a woman who tried to prevent him and others with him from assaulting another woman in a video that has gone viral has reacted to the scandal, confirming that he is indeed the man in the video.
The assault, which was first reported by Premium Times, has sparked outrage with many Nigerians calling for his prosecution and urging the Senate to also discipline him.
When contacted, the Senator told Channels Television that he would release an official statement in reaction to the assault video.
“We will be releasing statement maybe tomorrow afternoon,” he said, adding that the incident happened before he became a Senator.
Beyond that, the Senator claimed that the roughly 10-minute video was incomplete and he was at the shop because his sister had been assaulted there and that part was left out.
He said, “We will soon release an official statement to the viral video which happened before I became a senator where my younger sister was beaten to a pulp in a shop and I was called upon there; where I had to call an ambulance and a police to come to the scene and it got out of hand, I was also assaulted”.
“It is an old video, but we will soon release a statement to that effect. It was my sister that was at the store and she was assaulted; in fact, she fainted in the shop but they compressed the video and cut that part out of it”.
“They took her out to resuscitate her, the one standing with a cap is a doctor, the doctor had to come to give her life. My sister is not in the video, it was completely cropped out of it.”
Senator Abbo said he would be demanding the release of the full recording.
“This is a political season and now I am a politician, before I was not a politician but now the reality of the fact is that I am now a politician and politicians are not people who are liked, they exhume things of 20 years and they hang it on their neck now,” he said.
“As I said before, we will release a robust response to everything, and we will also ask for the entire video to be released since they have the video. We will seat and discuss about the video. Just to be clear that video was taken long before now and it was released just as this point.”
Brutal Assault
In the CCTV video, the Senator had, however, not mentioned anything about his sister being assaulted. The video showed him seated in the shop for a while as activities went on. He then got on the phone, walked out of the office for a bit, came back in and sat down.
Four minutes into the video, he received another call. Shortly after, a policeman came in and he informed the policeman, that the shop attendant is his friend but that she insulted him.
“She is not my enemy; she is my friend. We are not enemies; she is my friend and I have known her for over five years. But she insulted me. She said I am drunk, I am stupid and I am mad,” he said before asking the policeman to take her away.
As he was speaking to the policeman, the lady made a call of her own to inform her father about what was going on, but the move angered Abbo, who ordered her to stop the call.
As she tried to round off the call, another man with Abbo tried to slap the phone away, prompting another woman in the shop to intervene.
After the woman asked the man to “take it easy”, Abbo flew into a rage and attacked her.
The assault has attracted widespread condemnation, emerging as a top trend on social media with more than 100,000 tweets dedicated to it, many of them declaring the action as unacceptable, shameful, and criminal and demanding that the authorities, particularly the police and the Senate, should act.
Asides Nigerians condemning the act, Amnesty International had also in a tweet called on the Nigeria Police @PoliceNG to investigate Senator Elisha Abbo (Adamawa North) for alleged assault on staff of an adult shop he patronises in Abuja as the video of the senator assaulting women is widely available for police to act, Amnesty twitted.
