The crisis in the Edo State House of Assembly today (Monday) took a new dimension as the lawmakers resorted to physical combat in a bid to enforce the suspension of their colleagues.
Trouble began when the court bailiff served contempt proceedings on the four lawmakers while they sat with their other colleagues outside the Edo State House of Assembly.
Calling each other unprintable names when both factions arrived the House for sitting on Monday morning, they insisted they were going in despite the suspension and injunction from the courts.
Nigeria’s Rivers State Police Command today freely used teargas to disperse 22 lawmakers, who had come to the Assembly Complex to sit.
Twenty-five members of the state House of Assembly loyal to the state governor were stopped by the policemen, who mounted a roadblock with two armoured personnel carriers and 14 patrol vans on both ends of Moscow Road ostensibly to prevent the lawmakers from gaining entry into the House of Assembly complex.
The pro-Amaechi lawmakers, led by the Deputy Speaker, Mr. Leyii Kwanee, told the policemen that they (Assembly members) were acting on a court ruling in Abuja that the National Assembly should no longer take over the functions of the state lawmakers.
The United States extended embassy closures by a week in the Middle East and Africa as a precaution on Sunday after an al Qaeda threat that U.S. lawmakers said was the most serious in years.
The State Department said 19 U.S. embassies and consulates would be closed through Saturday "out of an abundance of caution" and that a number of them would have been closed anyway for most of the week due to the Eid celebration at the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
The United States initially closed 21 US diplomatic posts for the day on Sunday. Some of those will reopen on Monday, including Kabul, Baghdad and Algiers. Four new diplomatic posts - in Madagascar, Burundi, Rwanda and Mauritius - were added to the closure list for the week.
The US Embassy in Nigeria is also being considered for closer.
