Nigerian panel considers closed hearing in probe of Abiola's death

LAGOS, Nigeria (Reuters) -- Nigeria's human rights inquiry commission on Tuesday weighed a request by a key witness to testify in private on how opposition leader Moshood Abiola died in detention in 1998.

The hearings have been dominated by the gripping testimony of late dictator Sani Abacha's chief of personal security, Hamza Al-Mustapha.

On Monday, Mustapha asked the commission to allow him to testify in private, saying that what he intended to say touched on national security.

He also said unnamed people had been threatening his parents since he accused unidentified powerful generals of wanting Abiola killed following Abacha's sudden death in June 1998.

Abiola collapsed and died exactly a month after Abacha's death. Both Abiola's personal physician and family have rejected the conclusions of an international panel of doctors that he had died of natural causes.

Officials of the commission, which is hearing cases of rights abuses committed mainly during decades of military rule, said they were waiting for a written summary of Mustapha's intended testimony.

The head of the inquiry, retired Supreme Court judge Chukwudifu Oputa, had indicated on Monday that he could consider a closed-door hearing.

"This is done everywhere in the world," Oputa said. "You do not disclose issues that have to do with national security in the open."

But he added that counsel must "first let us have the evidence of the information to be testified by the witness, so that the commission will then decide whether it borders on national security or not."

Mustapha's lawyer, Mohammed Na'Umar, told Reuters on Tuesday that they would file required information later in the day.

"It is not only testifying in [private] that we are interested in. The safety of Mustapha and his family take priority in this matter," Na'Umar said.

President Olusegun Obasanjo set up the commission to help Nigerians come to terms with the brutality of military dictatorship, which ended in 1999.

He himself has testified as a witness in a petition against his imprisonment for just over three years for an alleged coup plot against Abacha, which authorities now say was faked. Obasanjo's son filed the petition.

Many of the witnesses summoned before the panel are former military officers accused of murder, unjustified arrests and detentions, and torture.

Mustapha, probably the most powerful of Abacha's former aides, has been named by many petitioners in connection with alleged torture.

The former army major has been brought to the hearings daily from a maximum security prison in Lagos where he has been held in custody while awaiting trial on murder charges.

He denies torture allegations and appears to have succeeded in shifting public interest away from the charges against him to gripping disclosures about Abacha's secretive rule.

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