Taiwo Popoola
A human rights defender, Chidiebube Okeoma, has taken home a set of twin boys seized by a medical doctor for the inability of their mother to offset the medical bill after she was delivered of the babies on May 4, 2024.
Okeoma, in a statement in Owerri, the Imo State capital on Saturday, said that the Commissioner of Police, Aboki Danjuma, should be commended for his professional and fatherly intervention which ensured that the twin boys went home despite the doctor’s insistence to keep holding them against their fundamental human rights.
He said that he was not the first person who had gone to the maternity ward to request for the discharge of the babies and their 19-year old mother, but the doctor made it very impossible.
Okeoma disclosed that the CP’s intervention after the doctor acknowledged before him in his office on Thursday that he jokingly requested that the babies be exchanged in lieu of the delivery bill, was commendable.
The activist disclosed that apart from taking the babies home for the first time since they were born close to six months ago, well meaning citizens through his effort were able to secure the release of the babies and bought food items, diapers and gave a cash of N100,000 to the mother of the twins.
He urged the Commissioner to charge the doctor for hostage taking, abuse of the medical ethics and an attempt to compromise the identities of the twins.
The activist narrated that his team wasn’t the first to come for the discharge of the twins but the doctor kept hiking the delivery charges in order to make it difficult for whoever came for their release.
Okeoma appealed to the police chief to set up a panel to investigate the assault the doctor and his nurses inflicted on the 19-year-old nursing mother and the kids’ grandmother.
