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Senator Bukola Sara-ki was yesterday interrogated for sev-eral hours by the Special Fraud Unit, SFU, of the Nigeria Police in Abuja, after honouring an invi-tation extended to him by the Lagos office of the bureau over a N21bn loan from Intercontinental Bank Plc, which was even-tually written off by the bank under shady circum-stances. Saraki was grilled by SFU officers, including the Commissioner in charge, Tunde Ogunsakin for about 11 hours.He had pleaded to be al-lowed to report to the SFU office in Abuja in a deal he made with the police on Sunday, while the unit’s boss, Ogunsakin went to Abuja yesterday to super-vise the interrogation of the senator. The grilling started around 9am and ended around 8pm when he was released. Ogunsakin told National Mirror that the former gov-ernor was released based on the mutual understand-ing that he will report at the Lagos office of the Unit for further interrogations.

[b]“We started his inter-rogation around 9am and the enormity of the case and evidences against him meant that we had to subject him to a grueling session. For now, we are al-lowing him to go home with an agreement that he will report in our Lagos office on Wednesday for further questioning,” Ogunsakin said. [/b]Saraki was alleged to have obtained the loan through a company, Joy Petroleum Limited, report-edly owned by him. His unwillingness to honour a string of police information led to his being declared wanted.

Saraki was said to have been accompanied by for-mer Governor Gbenga Daniel of Ogun State and a handful of other sympathi-sers to the Louis Edet Police Headquarters.Frank Mbah, Deputy Force Public Relations Of-ficer had earlier confirmed that Saraki was being held at Force Headquarters and that he could not tell how long the interrogation might last.“I can confirm to you that Senator Saraki is still with us.

He is undergoing interrogation and he has made some useful com-ments to the police. He is at the Force Headquarters,” Mba had said.Meanwhile, the Kwara Freedom Network, a pres-sure group in the Kwara State has called on the po-lice not to stop at investi-gating Saraki, but to also go further to prosecute him over the alleged loan fraud.

Leader of the group, Chief Iyiola Oyedepo, who spoke on behalf of the group at a press conference in Ilorin yesterday, said al-though, the ex-governor is still presumed to be a mere suspect, the court of law is the only level where Saraki can be cleared or convicted.He said the fraud allega-tion and the drama that the senator imported into the invitation extended to him by the police, calls for thor-ough investigation.

Oyedepo said Senator Saraki had an anteced-ent in the defunct Societe Generale Bank, SGBN, where he was the vice chairman, with the bank going into liquidation with depositors’ money affected.He disclosed that his group has four other pe-titions against Saraki, which he said, had been registered at the offices of the Economic and Finan-cial Crimes Commission, EFCC and the Independent Corrupt Practices Commis-sion, ICPC.

“We are even in the pro-cess of logging a fresh one. Investigation should not be the end, he must face pros-ecution too,” he added.

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