By - New scrutiny of the charge sheet in the Al-Amin Mohammed case contradicts Oyo Police’s public denial that the prosecution was tied to an N8,000 debt
- Legal experts say the real offence in the case, an unlawful seizure of Mohammed’s phone by a creditor’s apprentice, was never investigated, while the alleged debtor was the one detained and prosecuted
- Case exposes a recurring gap between what Nigerian law permits police to do with civil disputes and what happens on the ground at the divisional level
When AfrikTimes first reported the death of 30-year-old polytechnic student Al-Amin Mohammed a week ago, the story read as a tragedy shaped by conflicting accounts, his family blaming police heavy-handedness over an N8,000 debt, the police insisting the case was never about money at all. A week on, a documented paper trail has emerged that narrows that dispute considerably, and it does not favour the police’s version.
The Charge Sheet Contradicts the Statement
After AfrikTimes’ initial report, the Oyo State Police Command issued a statement rejecting any suggestion that Mohammed’s detention and prosecution were linked to the debt, describing that framing as false and misleading. The Command maintained he had instead been charged over an alleged assault and the destruction of an Airtel SIM registration device worth N177,000.
A subsequent review of the actual charge sheet, however, found that the account was incomplete. Mohammed was charged with conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace and with damaging a phone valued at N177,000, and the second count on that sheet explicitly referenced the N8,000 debt. Whatever the police said publicly, the paperwork used to prosecute Mohammed did not fully separate the criminal allegation from the underlying financial dispute the family had pointed to from the beginning.
That lacuna is greatly important, owing to how it goes to the heart of what should never have happened in the first place.
The Legal Question Nobody at the Station Seems to Have Asked
AfrikTimes recalls that the sequence that ended with Mohammed’s prosecution began, by every account, family, creditor and police alike, with the seizure of his phone by an apprentice of the POS operator he owed money to. Mohammed had paid N15,000 of a N23,000 obligation and left N8,000 outstanding. When he did not pay it, the apprentice took his phone while he was reportedly asleep.
Constitutional lawyer Musbau Saheed told Punch that this single act, not anything Mohammed himself is accused of, was the actual crime in the story. Nigerian law does not permit self-help of that kind, he said, pointing to Section 44 of the 1999 Constitution and the Supreme Court’s ruling in Military Governor of Lagos State v Ojukwu, which held that even government agencies cannot seize property without due process, let alone a private individual owed money. Seizing someone’s belongings over a debt, Saheed said, amounts to stealing and criminal conversion under the Criminal Code and Penal Code, prosecutable offences in their own right.
Instead, it was Mohammed, the person whose property had been taken without a court order, who ended up arrested, charged, remanded, and eventually dead. Saheed called this outcome a double failure. Police first tolerated an unlawful seizure, then compounded it by detaining the person that seizure was committed against, in the process violating Section 35 of the Constitution’s guarantee of personal liberty.
Section 32(2) of the Police Act 2020 is explicit that a civil wrong or breach of contract cannot by itself justify an arrest. A debt, in other words, is not a crime, and the law does not treat it as one. Unfortunately, the practical effect of how this case unfolded was that Oyo police ended up functioning as an enforcement arm for a private financial dispute rather than as an investigator of an actual offence.
“He Sounded Depressed”
Retired Deputy Superintendent of Police Isiaka Ayole, a family friend who personally stood bail for Mohammed at the Agodi Custodial Centre, offered one of the more striking secondhand accounts of Mohammed’s state of mind in his final days.
According to Ayole, Mohammed told him plainly that he believed he had suffered because he was poor and had no connections, and that he kept returning to the idea that the apprentice who took his phone was the one who had actually broken the law. Ayole said the specificity of that framing suggested Mohammed had been coached on his rights while in custody and that he sounded depressed throughout their conversation.
Whether that detail changes the legal picture, it adds a layer to how Mohammed experienced the four days he spent remanded over a dispute that, on the law’s own terms, should never have resulted in his detention.
A Family Already Stretched Thin
Court-ordered bail of N100,000, with two sureties, is a considerable sum for many Nigerian households, and Mohammed’s family has described in some detail what it cost them to meet it.
It’s on record that his mother sold her phone to raise transport money to visit him in custody and bring him food. His father turned to relatives and well-wishers and sold personal items to help meet the bail conditions. Both parents have said they are still struggling to reconcile how a dispute over so small an amount ended in their son’s death, describing him as the family’s primary breadwinner despite his youth.
Accountability Advocates Demand Real Investigation into the Matter
Okechukwu Nwanguma, who heads the Rule of Law and Accountability Advocacy Centre, argued that the case calls for a review focused not on any individual officer’s culpability but on whether the police properly distinguished between investigating a genuine criminal allegation and using the machinery of prosecution to help a creditor collect a debt.
In his further contentions, he invited an independent review to reconstruct the entire chain of events, from the original seizure of the phone through the vigilante handover, the arrest, the bail demands, the remand and what followed after Mohammed’s release, to establish whether opportunities to de-escalate the dispute peacefully were missed.
That framing, distinguishing a legitimate criminal case from the improper use of criminal process to settle a civil matter, is likely to outlast this individual case. Legal experts interviewed pointed to a broader pattern in Nigerian policing, particularly at the divisional level, where debt disputes routinely end up processed as criminal matters despite clear statutory language barring exactly that.
What Happens Next
The matter remains formally unresolved, as no independent investigation into the circumstances of Mohammed’s detention and death has yet been announced by either the Oyo State Government or the Nigeria Police Force, despite his family’s appeal to President Bola Tinubu and the Inspector General of Police. The complainant in the case, POS operator Kazeem, has maintained that he never sought Mohammed’s prosecution and only wanted his money back, saying the resources spent pursuing the case already exceeded the debt itself, a detail that, if accurate, raises its own question about who exactly pushed the matter toward court once it reached the police station.
For now, the case sits at the intersection of a family’s grief and a legal community’s warning that what happened to Al-Amin Mohammed was not simply an unfortunate outcome but the predictable result of a system that keeps allowing civil debts to be enforced through criminal process.
