Saturday, January 24, 2026 - A Nigerian, Gideon Eze, detained for six weeks in Doha, Qatar’s capital city, has cried out to the Federal Government and its relevant agencies to intervene in his case to reverse the injustice done to him.
Eze’s lawyer, Inibehe Effiong said Eze had boarded Qatar
Airways’ flight from Abuja to the United States on May 7, 2025 but had his trip
aborted in Doha due to a profiling and mistreatment incident that resulted from
a routine airport security check.
Effiong said during the check, security officials claimed to
have found items they suspected to be illicit drugs, but which turned out to be
false alarm after being subjected to series of tests.
He said the tests included chemical swabs, machine analysis
and tongue-tasting as well as “two complete searches of my checked luggage and
a full strip-search,” adding that “every single test result was negative for
narcotics,”
Eze, who spoke alongside his lawyer, said despite the clear
evidence of his innocence, the Qatari security personnel escalated the
situation.
He added: “I was detained, my passport and phone seized and
my checked luggage forcibly removed from the aircraft and searched twice.
Nothing illegal was found.
“I was handcuffed behind my back, driven in a black vehicle,
and taken to a detention facility called Duhaill, under the pretext of a ‘final
test’ that would take just two hours.
“At the detention centre, I was subjected to a degrading
strip search. I was stripped completely naked, ordered to jump, squat, and
cough, while a device passed around my genitals and anus. Again, nothing
incriminating was found on me.
“I was detained and compelled to sign a report written
entirely in Arabic, which falsely declared the harmless stones were ‘cocaine
stones. That was how I spent six weeks in detention.
“I later learnt through the Nigerian embassy in Qatar they
had sent the stones for forensic lab analyses during my detention. The analyses
surprisingly took six weeks, after which the results came out, still showing
the stones were benign and non-narcotics.
“I was ultimately released from custody without any charge
or conviction on June 19th, 2025, confirming the complete lack of evidence or
legal basis for the original accusation and detention,” he said.
Eze added that days after his release, he found that his
U.S. visa was revoked on May 12, 2025 due to his wrongful arrest at the Hammad
International Airport, Doha.
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