A Federal High Court sitting in Abuja has remanded a journalist, Agba Jalingo, at the Kuje Medium Security Custodial Centre, over an article published against Elizabeth Frank Ayade, a sister-in-law to the Cross River State governor, Ben Ayade.
Mr. Jalingo was remanded by the court, following a ruling by Justice Zainab Bage Abubakar on Monday, March 27, 2023.
The charges brought before the court, against Jalingo, who is the publisher of Cross River Watch, bordered on false publication deliberately to cause “annoyance, ill will and insult” on the person of Elizabeth Ayade.
Justice Abubakar instructed that Jalingo be remanded till Thursday, March 30, and declined his lawyers’ proposal to move for bail.
The journalist was arrested in August 2022 by security operatives who laid siege to his Lagos residence for hours and transported him to Abuja after successfully arresting him.
The complaint, which claimed that Jalingo wrote a defamatory article about her, demanded N500 million as compensation.
The journalist had reported that a lecturer of law, at the University of Calabar, being tried by a court in Abuja for examination malpractice, had been writing exams for a “prominent Obudu woman.”
Meanwhile, this is not the first time the journalist will be detained. He had gotten into several situations in the past, and It would be recalled that he also had an issue in 2021, when officials of the Cross River State Police Command arrested him over a planned June 12 protest.
