YAKASAI, ABACHA'S DOCTOR, DENIES AUTHORSHIP OF CONTROVERSIAL PRISON NOTE

By NBF News

Former military doctor in the Presidential Villa, Aso Rock, Colonel Ibrahim Yakasai(retd), has again denied authorship of the controversial 'prison notes' which indicted a number of key players in the regime of the late General Sani Abacha.

Speaking to journalists at the weekend in Kano, Yakasai explained that the notes were the handiwork of an unknown enemy, who had scores to settle with him and with all the personalities mentioned in the script that was published.

Yakasai's denial gained fresh currency following revelations of the former chief security officer, Major Hamza Al-Mustapha, before a Lagos High Court about the events that happened in the last days of the regime. His words:  'I have not written any prison notes and did not grant any interview or license anybody to write anything about my experience while in detention.

'In 1999, I was incarcerated in Owerri Prison and that was the time the police came in numbers and they showed me a magazine that purportedly published a prison note. But I told them that I was just seeing the note for the first time and I don't know anything about it. They spent two weeks questioning me on that note and I repeatedly told them I don't know anything about it.

'I have never granted an interview or commissioned anyone to do so on my behalf and I requested them to go back and ask the publishers of the publications. I have no hand in it at all and whatever it contained.' Recounting his sufferings in Owerri Prison, the former personal physician to General Abacha revealed that he was handcuffed and chained to the ground as at the time of the publication, adding that the prison authority, as a matter of policy, only allowed his wife and a brother to visit him on a monthly basis.

Yakasai, who is presently a consultant gyneacologist at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, Kano, recalled that the police had since exonerated him from the authorship of the controversial 'prison notes' and the message contained in it. He, however, stated that he had no intention to seek redress over the 'offensive and embarrassing publication,' stressing that he had since accepted his trial and tribulation as something that was ordained by God.