Senator Elisha Abbo, representing Adamawa North, lied about been physically assaulted while he was beating a woman at a intimacy gadget shop, Pleasure Chest, in Abuja, a source told The Guardian.
“Who could have attacked a senator in the company of a policeman,” the source who is a family relation to the shop owner, identified as Kemi, said in a brief chat with The Guardian said.
The source said the senator came with his entourage, while they were attending to them, “the lady with the senator started complaining that something was smelling awful in the shop and was trying to make a case out of it.”
“But the sales girl that was slapped was maintaining her stand that nothing is smelling and tried to make a joke it that maybe it was someone’s hair that was smelling,” the source said.
The senator confirmed that he is the man in the video assaulting a woman, but he insisted he was also assaulted too.
“Where I had to call an ambulance and police to come to the scene and it got out of hand I was also assaulted,” he told Channels Television Wednesday morning.
“We will soon release an official statement to the viral video which happened before I became a senator where my younger sister was beaten to a pulp in a shop and I was called upon there,” Abbo said.
The assault, which was first reported by Premium Times, has sparked a wave of indignation among politicians, celebrities, human rights activists and advocate groups.
Critics are calling for his prosecution and urging the Senate to also discipline him.
Meanwhile, the senator claimed that the roughly 10-minute video was incomplete, claiming he was at the shop because his sister had been assaulted there and that part was left out.
“They took her out to resuscitate her, the one standing with a cap is a doctor, the doctor had to come to give her life. My sister is not in the video, it was completely cropped out of it,” Abbo said.
He said he would be demanding the release of the full recording.
“This is a political season and now I am now a politician, before I was not a politician but now the reality of the fact is that I am now a politician and politicians are not people who are liked, they exhume things of 20 years and they hang it on their neck now,” he said.
“As I said before we will release a robust response to everything, and we will also ask for the entire video to be released since they have the video. We will seat and discuss the video. Just to be clear that video was taken long before now and it was released just as this point.”
