Video captures Nigeria’s Imo State’s police in violent raid on unarmed family; later, raid leader played victim of a traditional ritual
by Piyush Mathur
Trigger alert: This report includes the link to an audiovisual file showing a disturbing police raid on a family; this includes gunshots and blood.
A short audiovisual file received by Thoughtfox shows at least two armed men—claimed to be members of the anti-kidnapping unit of the Tiger Base police of Owerri, the capital of Nigeria’s Imo State—violently interacting with the female members of a household in their home’s front yard. This incident reportedly occurred on December 28, 2025, in Ndionyaguru Village, in Awa Autonomous Community, located within the Oguta Local Government Area (LGA).
These armed men seem to have the support of several other unarmed men (and likely one woman, who is visible briefly from the back). As the two armed men keep shouting at and shoving the family’s females (one of whom is brutally slapped by one of the armed men), a short elderly man wearing dark sun glasses emerges from inside the home to defend them and prevent the invading males from getting into the house’s backyard. This short elderly man, later reported to be blind, can be seen in the video groping in front of him to locate and stop the aggressors.
This is the man who can be seen and heard, in the video, slapping an unarmed daughter of Mr. Joseph Ottih & Mrs. Oby Ottih. (Image credit: Thoughtfox)
Gunshots & blood
While all these family members—all of whom except Joseph being female—are deeply disturbed, agitated, and resistant, they are completely unarmed and also outnumbered by the male outsiders surrounding them. As for the two armed men, their guns are not small weapons but big items.
The slapping incident is partially visible but clearly audible at 29–30 seconds in the video.
The situation rapidly becomes very chaotic, and the smartphone camera grabbing the footage gets out of focus and loses the visual part; however, one can hear the noises—and eventually there are gunshots.
The gunshots are heard at 1:21.
Then, briefly—from 1:56 to 1:58—the bloodied foot of a female (reportedly the elderly blind man’s daughter) is visible.
One can hear frightened screams, including references to blood and Jesus, right after the shots are heard; one can hear lots of commotion as the video draws to an abrupt close.
Prior journalistic accounts
The background details regarding this raid are substantively presented in a January 18, 2026 Sahara Reporters article authored by Dr. Leo Igwe, the founder and chief executive officer of Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW). (This article was also published the same day in News Planet.)
What Igwe’s article tells us is that following a tip-off from a local human rights activist regarding this raid and its aftermath, he and his colleague had visited the family seen in the video and also talked to the police personnel involved in this sordid affair.
Mr. Joseph Ottih and his wife Mrs. Obiageli (Oby) Ottih, whose family was attacked by the Tiger Base police in December 2025 (Image credit: Sahara Reporters)
Igwe identifies the policeman who fired the shots heard in the video as Mr. Chikadibia Okebala, who was also the leader of the raid. He also mentions that the family whose home was raided included a 70-year old man, Mr. Joseph Ottih, his wife Mrs. Obiageli (Oby) Ottih, and their children.
A previous, January 16, report carried by The Eagle Online had also mentioned that Joseph is blind, and his family has 10 children; another report published the same day in The News Planet had noted a claim attributed to Joseph that his ‘eight children’ were beaten.
Joseph’s photograph included in Igwe’s report—and another photograph of his carried by The News Planet—also shows him wearing the same big dark glasses as seen in the video: the type that many ‘blind’ people around the world tend to use.
A circle of unreason
Inasmuch as the raid’s video footage is heart-wrenching, what led up to the raid itself is a bizarre tale of two sets of fact-free metaphysical beliefs—uncompromisingly religious, on the one side, and somewhat traditional, on the other—dividing up a clan into two and bringing them into a clash. The clan members on the religious side had ended up instigating vigilante attacks (and the police raid) against the side that had resorted to a traditional ritualistic practice that the former would not tolerate.
This is an image of the traditional ritual called ‘Agwu’ that the Tiger Base police of Owerri, Imo State, Nigeria, confiscated from a family.
(Image credit: News Planet, Nigeria)
Championed by Mr. Hilary Onyema Ottih, a US-returned man, the Christian-religious side had felt threatened by the ritual called Agwu, which his elder brother Joseph and his family had cobbled together within their domestic compounds—and did not want to dismantle.
Following that initial stalemate, Hilary and his other family members led a local vigilante campaign to remove the ritual; when that also failed, they called up the police to do it for them with their backing—and the result is what we see and hear in the video.
The video shows the police being verbally abusive and physically violent toward Joseph and his family; what we don’t see but Igwe’s report claims took place is Okebala’s hitting Joseph with his gun. The video’s audio-only segment does offer wildly chaotic noises of scuffles.
This raid itself was not the end of the torment that Joseph and his family would receive.
Igwe notes that on January 3, Oby was basically abducted in the local market by the same vigilante group, who threw her into a car’s dicky and took her to the Tiger Base police headquarters.
The police—referred generically as ‘the Imo State Police Command’ by Juliana Francis of The Eagle Online—kept her in jail for 4 days and released her only after her family had paid them One Hundred and Fifty Thousand Naira. The Eagle Online has referred to this amount as ‘extortion in violation of the law.’
As for the ‘ritual’ itself—stored by the police as evidence to be shown in a court of law, and shown to Igwe and his colleague—it consisted of ‘a dead and rotten chicken, some carved wooden items, a long rod with some small gongs attached to it, and some red and black cloth’, per Igwe’s report.
But why the couple had resorted to this ritual is in itself also a rather sad, even if a ludicrous, story.
Igwe notes that Joseph and Oby believed that by using this ritual they could cure their son of an undiagnosed health challenge: undiagnosed apparently because the family had not consulted a board-certified medical professional. He provides a mind-boggling list of allegedly ‘holy’ or ‘magical’ individuals as well as institutions, from various places (named in his report), that the couple had paid over the course of years so that they would cure their son through their mystical means. One of these healers had advised the couple to put together this Agwu.
Thoughtfox added up the sums indicated in Igwe’s account. The couples’ overall expenditure on these fake healers comes up to Four Million Nine Hundred and Seventy Thousand Naira (4,97,00,00) or a little over € 3000: which is a considerable sum anywhere, but especially in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The police car had a crash while returning from the raid—and Okebala felt the need to mention it.
Apparently, after the raid, no alleged God chose to bless the police—the de facto leader of the religious front against the traditional Agwu.
Per Igwe’s report, when he and his AfAW colleague talked to the police, the raid’s leader, Okebala, whined that the police car had met with an accident while returning from the scene—and Hilary (Joseph’s brother, one key person who had sought the raid) had become ill and wheelchair-bound after the raid.
This is the car, used by the Tiger Base police team, for its raid and transportation of the dismantled Agwu; the police seemed to blame the Agwu for its wreck during their return journey from the raided home of Joseph & Oby Ottih (Image credit: News Planet)
It is usually embarrassing for a person to wreck his or her own car—and it is expected that a police party would be even more embarrassed about its failure to drive safely. That surely was not the case with Okebala—likely because he did not believe that the wreck was the driver’s responsibility.
In mentioning the wreck to Igwe, Okebala—Igwe surmises—meant to blame both the wreck and Hillary’s sudden illness on the power of the Agwu: which he and his men had themselves dismantled before storing it in the car for transporting it to the police compounds.
After being brutally slapped by a policeman, a daughter of Mr. Joseph Ottih & Mrs. Oby Ottih makes a protest; Joseph, in dark glasses, is in the background. (Image credit: Thoughtfox)
In conceding that power to the Agwu, though, Okebala’s statements to Igwe appeared to have overlooked the assumed alleged omnipotence of the alleged ‘God’ of the religions—Christianity’s, in this case. As for the Agwu, it not only had no power to prevent the raid—or being dismantled and taken away by the police—it also could not protect the family that had assembled it from the violence it would receive in reference to it.
In the Agwu’s defence, though, it would have to be mentioned that it was put together, from the viewpoint of the family, for a somewhat specific purpose: of healing a child; and the family’s claim, while unreasonable, had anyway been that the child had been healing since its installation. But as one might imagine, even this assumptive aspect of the family’s claim would be contested by its equally assumptive opponents—such as a barrister, mentioned further below, who would reject the identity of the ritual itself!
This whole scenario will seem peculiar to somebody who has not had to delve into the world of self-contradictory metaphysical lies that rule the minds of many who disagree merely about their groupings. These groupings of lies—be they the religious claims or countless traditions, customs, and practices that have no evidentiary support—are mutually and generally tolerable so long as their adherents do not cause violence. But that’s not what has happened in this case.
What appears to have happened here is that the police—accompanied by local religious vigilantes— viciously attacked a family and destroyed its properties (whose list is provided in Igwe’s report) just because it disapproved of a traditional ritual that the latter had embraced. This is the dimension of this case that also happens to explain AfAW’s role at all in this affair—in that this organisation seeks to minimise or prevent harassment of those accused of engaging in rituals that are non-violent. A non-profit, non-governmental outfit, AfAW also seeks to hold accountable the coercive actors within this domain of metaphysical assumptions while also seeking to debunk the notion that such traditional rituals as well as any religious beliefs and practices have any power to them.
But the lawyer for the Hilary camp has rubbished the allegation that ‘religion’ had anything to do with the police raid—and what to make of that?
A January 17, 2026 report carried by News Planet reported that Barrister Vivian Ottih—a sister of Hillary and Joseph—had ruled out religion to be the cause of the family’s conflict and the raid. She, instead, blamed Joseph’s wife (or her own sister-in-law), Oby, for hitting her daughter ‘with a pestle on the back of her neck’, claiming that her arrest was under the charges of ‘attempted murder’ rather than because of the ritual.
Barrister Vivian Ottih, a sister of Joseph and Hilary (Image credit: Joseph Otih)
Vivian’s daughter is identified as Chinenye by Francis in her report for The Eagle Online (though it is misspelt as Chineye). While Vivian has claimed to have called the police to arrest Oby because she had attacked Chinenye, she has also claimed, curiously, that she had arranged for Oby’s bail.
Vivian appears to make this bail-related claim to provide cover to the police regarding the accusation that it had extorted money to release Oby. As for the police raid on Joseph-and-Oty’s home, she claimed that it was called upon by Eze Ihezie Felix Ononuju, the traditional community ruler, rather than by Hillary or his family (or herself). This claim has little merit given that the traditional seat, which Ononuju occupies, is locally known to be financed by Hilary himself.
Meanwhile, Vivian’s other statements cited in the News Planet report do place the ritual itself at the centre of this whole affair.
She alleges, for instance, that Joseph had lied to the press while her other brother, Hilary, was innocent of any wrong-doing while also claiming that the ritual was put together by Joseph to increase his wealth (rather than to cure a child).
Referring to the ritual as ‘Agbara’—rather than ‘Agwu’, which is (falsely) believed to be related to health among many members of the Igbo culture—Vivian further sustains the narrative that Joseph’s family was pressured by the vigilante group to get rid of the ritual because it was causing communal tension. Moreover, the attack she alleges Oby perpetrated on her daughter is claimed to have occurred, per her own statements, after the police raid (whose purpose was the ritual’s confiscation anyway).
In her statements to The Eagle Online, Vivian also seems to subscribe to the power of the ritual, blaming it for the police car’s accident; and she blames Igwe’s associate, Elizabeth, instead, for extorting money from Joseph and then falsely claiming that she gave it to the police to secure Oby’s release.
How can one ignore the video, though?
While Vivian’s claims seem very flimsy all the way through—and they include an allegation that Joseph’s children were involved in Internet fraud—the raid’s video footage itself tells quite a bit of the story.
In a nutshell, this is the story of the Tiger Base police’s blatantly unlawful conduct and the victimisation of the family of Joseph and Oby—apparently at the behest of Hilary and supporters within the family and the community.
As far as AfAW’s field investigation is concerned, Joseph’s statement—paraphrased in Igwe’s journalistic account in Sahara Reporters—implicates Vivian herself in a violent incident that is claimed to have taken place the day after the police raid.
Igwe’s account contains the following allegation:
Joseph stated that the following day, Hilary mobilized his siblings, including Vivian Ottih, Nnachi Ottih, Nneka Ottih, Chinenye Ottih, and Chiamaka Ottih. They came and confronted him and the family. Hilary came with a pistol, Nnachi was armed with a machete, and threatened to cut off the head of Chinemere. Vivian held the hair attachment of one of the daughters and dragged it violently. In addition, Joseph said that Hilary used a pestle and hit him on the shoulder, back, hip, and legs. Hilary tried hitting him on the head, but someone stopped him.
One must understand that allegations of human rights abuses had been accumulating against the Tiger Base Unit for quite sometime.
There is already a Coalition Against Tiger Base Impunity (CAPTI) that prepared its own report, ahead of this raid on Joseph’s home, against this unit in December 2025. Previously, in June 2025, a US-based organisation called The Washington Center for Human Rights (WCHR), had demanded that this unit be disbanded. While there are several other journalistic reports and petitions against this unit in the interim, one could go further back to 2023, and find this one prepared by the Rule of Law and Accountability Advocacy Centre (RULAAC). Closer to the writing of this report, Amnesty International Nigeria declared on Facebook on February 20, 2026 that it is about to launch a report on this unit.
Given all that history, the case of this raid—backed by this video evidence, and AfAW’s advocacy—might turn out to be another nail, if not the last one, in the Tiger Base’s coffin. One has to mention all this so that neither Agwu nor Agbara nor any other metaphysical fabrication is blamed in retrospect.
Piyush Mathur has previously taught Communication at the American University of Nigeria.
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Background references
News Planet (January 16, 2026): https://newsplanet.com.ng/man-destroys-elder-brothers-house-over-witchcraft-accusation-wife-detained-for-five-days/
News Planet (January 17, 2026): https://newsplanet.com.ng/oby-was-arrested-for-attempted-murder-not-deity-otti-family-reveals/
The Eagle Online (February 3, 2026): https://theeagleonline.com.ng/tension-as-police-wade-into-traditional-practice-attempted-murder-case/
Sahara Reporters (January 18, 2026): https://saharareporters.com/2026/01/18/policing-witchcraft-accusations-and-agwu-beliefs-extortion-exploitation-and-impunity-imo