Mudashiru Atanda

Gender: Male
Radio Journalist

The three newspaper photographers—Olatunji Obasa with Punch, Olu Aremo with Leadership, and Mudashiru Atanda with The Sun—told CPJ in phone interviews that the incident occurred at the headquarters of Nigeria’s National Identity Management Commission, while they were covering people enrolling in a government program to link their phone SIM cards with their national identification numbers, as required by a new government policy. At around noon, after the journalists had been covering the event for about two hours and had photographed law enforcement officers harassing a woman for allegedly stepping out of line, two Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps officers confronted Obasa, Aremo, and Atanda, they said. One officer grabbed Obasa’s camera and attempted to hit him, Obasa said, saying that the officer did not injure him but broke his camera beyond repair. Aremo said that he and Atanda noticed that altercation, and tried to intervene, but another defense corps officer stopped them and attempted to seize both their cameras, which the journalists resisted. While they argued with the officers, a senior defense corps officer aggressively asked them how they got permission to enter and cover the event, Aremo said. An officer with Nigeria’s Department of State Services then intervened and requested Aremo and Atanda surrender their cameras to him, rather than to the Security and Civil Defence Corps officers, and the journalists complied, Atanda said.

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