The Peoples Democratic Party has urged the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), to go beyond scrapping the Special Anti-Robbery Squad to restructure and overhaul the Nigeria Police.

The party also berated the ruling All Progressives Congress for attempting to trivialize the excesses of the disbanded SARS.

This was contained in a statement titled, “SARS: PDP Demands Complete Overhaul, Restructuring Of Police …Berates APC For Attempting To Trivialize SARS Excesses,” signed by the National Publicity Secretary of the PDP, Kola Ologbondiyan, in Abuja, on Monday.

He said the party welcomes the dissolution of the Federal Special Anti-Robbery Squad of the police but charges President Buhari to also take immediate steps to “completely overhaul and restructure the entire police architecture to engender professionalism, adherence to rule of law and respect for the fundamental rights of Nigerians. “

The statement read in part, “Our party also demands that the Inspector General of Police, Mohammed Adamu, should go beyond dissolution and reassignment of SARS officers by commencing the profiling, arrest and prosecution of the members of the disbanded outfit and other errant police operatives involved in the reported series of extra-judicial killings, unlawful arrests and detention, extortion, harassment and dehumanization of innocent Nigerians, particularly in the last five years.

“Without mincing words, the PDP insists that no indicted officer should be reassigned and allowed to go unpunished after such heinous crime against the Nigerian people.

“Those who killed, maimed, dehumanized and foisted a reign of terror on innocent Nigerians must be made to answer for their devilish actions.”

The party said anything short of this will amount to granting official cover to felonious elements and a tacit encouragement of further perpetuation of such crimes against Nigerians.

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The party said it was miffed by moves by the leadership of the All Progressives Congress to use “a certain impostor as spokesperson“ in the social media to attempt to trivialize, politicize and detract from the essence of the public protest against the excesses of the disbanded police outfit.

It further said “Nigerians were shocked when a particular agent of the APC, in a tweet on Sunday, made false and diversionary allusions to the creation of SARS in a bid to divert attention apparently because of APC’s complicity in the atrocities being protested against by Nigerians.

“The APC is apparently jittery because, whereas SARS was created in 1992, far before the coming to power of the PDP, it had turned monstrous within five years of the command of APC administration, under which our nation has witnessed horrific cases of arbitrary and extra-judicial killings, illegal arrests, arbitrary detention, torture and reported disappearances as also detailed in the reports by the United States Department of State, Amnesty International (AI) and Transparency International.”