NOT ABDUCTED: Outrage in Nigeria as Pidom journalist, Bristol Isaac Tamunoibifiri, got arrested in his hotel room in Rivers state on August 5th, 2024

Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that Outrage in Nigeria as Pidom journalist, Bristol Isaac Tamunoibifiri, got arrested in his hotel room in Rivers state on August 5th, 2024.

On Friday, an intervention team involving Omoyele Sowore, David Hundeyin, Raphael Adebayo, Deji Adeyanju and FIJ was able to establish that the Force Criminal Investigation Department (FCID) housed Bristol after the National Cybercrime Center (NCCC) tracked and abducted him from a location in Nigeria’s southeast. READ MORE HERE

Isaac told representatives of this team that the police abducted and kept him in solitary confinement for at least six days in an anti-kidnapping unit before transferring him to a different facility. He later ended up in the FCID’s custody. READ MORE HERE

Adeyanju, who saw Isaac in custody on Friday, told FIJ in a telephone interview that the microblogger relayed how the police broke into his house and abducted him.

According to this unidentified person, PIDOM’s instructions to him/her were that if anything were to happen to him, the login details of his account should be handed over to me. Supposedly, his phone was destroyed during the arrest and given the alleged lack of evidence tying him to the Twitter handle, a case for his innocence could be made stronger if I used his account and tweeted in his voice. Supposedly, this person said, he had been granted administrative bail with “stringent conditions.”

All the Israeli surveillance tech they have spent billions on over the years was never used to prevent the ongoing hostile takeover of the Nigerian state that started in 2012. It was never used to prevent Nigeria from becoming the world leader in deaths caused by terrorism, ahead of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. It was not even used to prevent a coup next door which toppled a regime that was friendly to Nigeria, and installed one that chased NAF-001 – with Nigeria’s president onboard – out of its airspace at gunpoint.

Given this background, I had no idea what to do when this person claiming to be his close associate reached out to me using his account, offering me his login details. The purported associate claimed that PIDOM was arrested on August 5 in Port Harcourt and transferred to the Force Criminal Investigation Department (FCID) in Abuja shortly thereafter, where he remains under the purview of the National Cybercrime Centre (NCCC).

That being the case, the hysterical insistence by the “family members” that I keep his disappearance secret made no sense. If indeed the person allegedly in detention at FCID called “Isaac Bristol M” is indeed suspected by the NSA’s office of being the same person as PIDOM NIGERIA, his biggest chance of ever achieving freedom again would be for the public to make as much noise as possible, so that he would become recognised – correctly – as a political prisoner. Keeping quiet – and even helping to conceal his disappearance by tweeting from his account – would make me complicit in his disappearance.

In our several conversations, PIDOM alluded many times to having multi-factor authentication and multiple layers of security on all his social media accounts and electronic devices. The idea that I would be able to login to his account using only a username and password – no 2FA code from the supposedly destroyed phone containing the authenticator apps – meant that someone had systematically gained control over all his internet accounts. That phone was definitely not destroyed in the “scuffle” that allegedly culminated in his arrest.