Al-Mustapha rejects Abacha death claims | Sojworldnews
Former Chief Security Officer to the late Head of State, Gen. Sani Abacha, Maj. Hamza Al-Mustapha (retd.), has rejected an account by a former Department of State Services officer, Dennis Amachree, about the circumstances surrounding Abacha’s death.
Al-Mustapha spoke to journalists on Saturday during the 3rd General Hassan Usman Katsina Memorial Conference, which held at Arewa House in Kaduna. Consequently, his remarks reignited a decades-old controversy over the exact events that led to Abacha’s death on June 8, 1998.
Amachree, a retired Assistant Director of the DSS who served during the Abacha administration, recently revived the debate through his memoir. In the book, he gave his own version of the late military ruler’s final hours and claimed that Abacha suffered a fatal cardiac arrest during an intimate encounter with a woman at the Presidential Villa Guest House in Abuja. He further alleged that the episode occurred at about 4:05 a.m. and that the woman later fled to Lagos.
However, Al-Mustapha firmly dismissed the account and urged Nigerians to disregard it entirely. “The boy was asked by others to write those lies. I have all the CCTV footage of what happened in my custody, so what he said is not true,” he said.
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In addition, Al-Mustapha insisted that Amachree could not have witnessed the events he described, since he was not physically present when Abacha died. “In the first place, when Abacha died, the DSS director was not in Abuja,” he said. He also stressed that every person who entered the Villa around that time remained well documented. “Everybody who gained access to the Villa is well documented. I have the footage of the last moments of Abacha,” he added.
Furthermore, Al-Mustapha suggested that Amachree did not act alone in publishing the memoir. Instead, he claimed that unnamed interests influenced the retired DSS officer to put out a fabricated narrative. “I want to assure you that the author of the book is acting out a script. He is not acting alone. At the appropriate time, I will respond to these lies. You don’t tell your enemies your plans,” he said.
Nevertheless, Al-Mustapha chose not to reveal further details about his planned response. Instead, he simply appealed to the public to reject the claims outright. “Just ignore his lies. It’s bad to say such things about someone who is dead,” he said.
Meanwhile, Amachree’s memoir has already triggered strong reactions from other former officials who served under the Abacha regime, as well as from social media commentators. As a result, the renewed debate has once again placed Al-Mustapha, who remains one of the most controversial figures in Nigeria’s political history, at the center of public attention.
Following Abacha’s death, authorities arrested Al-Mustapha in 1999. He subsequently stood trial over the attempted murder of publisher Alex Ibru and the murder of Kudirat Abiola, wife of the presumed winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, Chief Moshood Abiola. After spending more than a decade in detention, the Court of Appeal eventually discharged and acquitted him in 2013.
Since then, Al-Mustapha has consistently pushed back against narratives that, in his view, misrepresent Abacha or distort the events surrounding his death. Therefore, his latest comments follow a familiar pattern in which he positions himself as the primary custodian of the truth about that period.
For now, Amachree has not publicly responded to Al-Mustapha’s rebuttal. However, given the persistent public interest in Abacha’s death, the controversy appears unlikely to fade soon. Ultimately, both accounts leave Nigerians to weigh conflicting versions of a moment that continues to shape conversations about one of the country’s most consequential military eras.
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