An eyewitness to what transpired when the NIHOTOUR Hotel Registration and Compliance Team stormed the Federal Palace Hotel, Victoria Island, Lagos has debunked NIHOTOUR’s version of what transpired on that day. He described the narration by the institute as false and an after-thought to cover for the misdemeanor by the Compliance Team. He said there are pictures and video evidence of everything that transpired. He challenged the institute to produce pictures or video evidence of the uniformed policeman assaulted to authenticate it’s claim.

The eyewitness who preferred his name not mentioned for fear of his safety said: “They came with armed policemen in two buses. They saw a white person and thought that the white man was our general manager and wanted to grab him. Ahmed protested that the man was not the General Manager. The man who claimed that his cloth was torn was a civilian to me because he was not wearing uniform. He said Ahmed tore his clothes. We went to their leader and promised since he claimed his shirt was torn, we will take care of it. The guy could have torn the shirt by himself. If you see the pictures where they were dragging Ahmed, over 20 armed policemen and people on civil clothes dragged him into a vehicle. We went and asked them why since we were already processing to pay the money, why arresting more people? Nobody resisted them. We were processing the money, why embarrassing people and arrested them? If we had resisted it is different. From the beginning they came like thugs. They told us who they were, but when we saw the policemen and the man who was their leader, we just wanted to know the modality of the process. We made calls to other hotels, they said that was how the equally stormed their hotels. We decided to pay to stop them from embarrassing our guests. While the money was being process, we went in and came out to see over 20 of them dragging Ahmed. There is a video footage.”