A former Assistant Director of the Department of State Services, Dennis Amachree, has dismissed long-standing claims that Nigeria’s former military Head of State, the late Gen. Sani Abacha, died after eating poisoned apples, insisting instead that the former ruler suffered a sex-induced cardiac arrest.
Amachree made the claim in his newly released memoir, DSS @40: My Journey Behind the Shield, where he recounted his experience as Assistant Director of Operations and Intelligence at the Lagos State Command of the DSS when Abacha died on June 8, 1998.
According to him, Abacha suffered a fatal cardiac arrest at about 4:05 a.m. during an intimate encounter with a woman at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.
He alleged that the woman, a pharmacist who was in Abuja for a conference, had accompanied her elder sister, said to have been Abacha’s girlfriend, to the Presidential Villa in the early hours of the day.
Amachree claimed that after the elder sister left, Abacha remained with the pharmacist and later became unresponsive during the encounter.
“At about 4.05 a.m., as they were getting intimate, the pharmacist realised Abacha had stopped moving.
She called out to him, but he was unresponsive and stiff. She checked his pulse; there was none,” he wrote.
The retired intelligence officer further alleged that the woman panicked and left the Presidential Villa after requesting transport back to her hotel, informing a soldier on duty that the Head of State had asked that she be driven back.
According to Amachree, by the time Abacha’s Chief Security Officer, Major Hamza Al-Mustapha, was informed of the development around 5 a.m. and efforts began to locate the woman, she had already boarded an early morning flight to Lagos.
He disclosed that he was subsequently directed by the DSS headquarters to trace and interrogate the woman.
“My team located and brought her to my office. I interrogated her myself. The first thing she said to me was, ‘I did not kill him; he died on top of me.’
After her detailed account, I called the Director in Abuja, and she was immediately flown back,” Amachree stated.
He maintained that the woman’s account remains the most credible explanation of the circumstances surrounding Abacha’s death and effectively debunks the conspiracy theories that have persisted for nearly three decades.
“The lady pharmacist’s account, on whom Abacha apparently had a coitus-induced cardiac arrest, remains the true position and puts an end to the conspiracy theories and half-truths that have gone viral,” he wrote.
Abacha ruled Nigeria from November 1993 until his sudden death on 8th June, 1998. Since then, conflicting accounts have continued to trail the circumstances surrounding his death, including claims that he was poisoned with apples allegedly brought to him by foreign women.
