Stop Keeping Seun Kuti’s Case File, Lawyers Tell Police

Seun, the late Fela Anikulapo-Kuti's son, has been detained by police since May 15 on suspicion of assaulting a police officer.

Seun Kuti's lawyers have leveled complaints against the police against the troubled Afrobeat singer.

They claimed that the police withheld the artist's case file in violation of a court order.

The attorneys requested that the Lagos State Deputy Commissioner of Police, Simon Lough, follow a magistrate's court

order to transmit the case file for the artist to the Lagos State Director of Public Prosecutions for legal counsel.

Seun, a son of the late Afrobeats legend, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, has been in police custody since May 15 for allegedly assaulting a police officer.

Adeyinka Olumide-Fusika, SAN, the singer's primary attorney, charged that the police had turned the case into a circus.

"Mr. Kuti submitted himself to the police so that he could go to court and defend himself against the charge of assaulting a police officer," he said. The cops have chosen to make a spectacle out of the situation and declare a "national emergency" rather than taking this easy and clear action.

When precisely is Mr. Kuti going to be charged for, as you put it in your statement, "attacking and slapping a police officer in uniform?" since he has been paraded in manacles and taken from one police station to another and from one location to another throughout Lagos State since Monday, May 15?

Kuti, according to the main attorney, was waiting patiently to be accused so he could provide his defense.

It shouldn't be unreasonable for an accused person to expect that, he continued. I sincerely hope that Lough, a senior advocate of Nigeria and attorney who is advising the police on this matter, will follow the magistrate's court's directive to send the case file to the director of public prosecutions in Lagos State for review by a lawyer and potential charge and prosecution in a court of law.

Lough had alleged on Thursday that Seun's legal team had chosen to participate in a public trial rather than let the legal system to work its course.

Olumide-Fusika refuted the assertion, asserting that the singer's team never participated in a "media trial or defense" of its client.