President Bola Tinubu has granted clemency to Major Suleiman Alabi Akubo, a former Nigerian army officer sentenced to life imprisonment for selling th
President Bola Tinubu has granted clemency to Major Suleiman Alabi Akubo, a former Nigerian army officer sentenced to life imprisonment for selling thousands of stolen military weapons to Niger Delta militants.
In a statement on Saturday, October 11, Bayo Onanuga, special adviser to the president on information and strategy, said Tinubu reduced Akubo’s life sentence to 20 years in recognition of his “good conduct and remorse.”
Akubo, 62 years old, was among 175 individuals recently pardoned or granted various forms of clemency after the national council of state’s approval.
Akubo was convicted in November 2008 by a military court in Kaduna for illegally selling more than 7,000 military weapons, including assault rifles, submachine guns, and rocket-propelled grenades, stolen from army depots at the command and staff college, Jaji, and the one base ordnance, Kaduna, between January 2000 and December 2006.
The weapons, valued at about ₦100 million at the time, were sold to the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), a militant group.
The court also found that some of the arms were purchased by Sunny Okah, brother of Henry Okah, MEND’s leader.
In 2016, MEND announced that the federal government had agreed to review Akubo’s and five other soldiers’ life sentences under the Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP)
