Why Was Lebanese Talal Ahmed Roda Sentenced To Life In Prison In Nigeria?

Talal Ahmed Roda is one amongst the three Lebanese men involved in an alleged terrorism case around the year 2013 involving popular Abuja based supermarket Amigo and the amusement park known as Wonderland owned by Mustapha Fawaz. Mustapha Fawaz, Abdallah Thahini and Talal Ahmed were said to be involved in a terrorist group known as Hezbollah, which used the Amigo supermarket and Wonderland amusement park as a front to hide ammunitions for the terrorist group.

The three Lebanese men were arrested and charged to court for terrorism and other related crimes after a discovery of a large cache of arms and ammunition in a bunker located in Kano state, and also confessing to some of the crimes after being interrogated by the Department of State Security (DSS) which tendered the confession videos in court as evidence, where they also admitted to undergoing training in the use of firearms, while in their country, Lebanon.

However, the trial of the three Lebanese men at the Federal High Court of Nigeria ended with two of them being Mustapha and Abdallah acquitted on grounds of lack of sufficient evidence against them leaving Talal who was actually arrested at the house in Kano state where the illegal firearms were found with a sentence of life imprisonment for being guilty of conspiracy. Talal did not spend much time in prison as in 2015, his sentence was overturned by the appex court which is the Supreme Court of Nigeria, on the ground that there was no direct evidence linking him to the cache of ammunition at the bunker in Kano state, even though he was found and arrested at that same bunker, as well as other legal technicalities which the court found enough to nullify the sentence that was pronounced on Talal, leaving him a free man today.

This is yet another story of the many foreign individuals who have come into Nigeria to exploit the country one way or the other committing several crimes for which they are never put behind bars for, meanwhile so many less privileged innocent victims of injustice continue to waste away in Nigerian prisons.

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