Emmanuel Ugwu, a correspondent for “ThisDay” newspaper in Enugu State in South eastern Nigeria petitioned the Nigerian Police over alleged death threats following a story he wrote for his newspaper about an assault on census enumerators in the 2006 housing and population census in Nigeria .
In a petition to the Enugu State Commissioner of Police, Ugwu said following a story he wrote about a violent attack on census enumerators in the town of Amankanu in the state, he started receiving phone calls threatening to trace him and kill him if he did not retract the story.He said a man who simply identified himself as Alex called him at about 9.18 pm on March 24, 2006, accusing him of being hired to write news stories tarnishing the image of Amankanu and giving him two days within which to retract the story he wrote.
Ugwu said the man threatened that if by 26 March 2006, he failed to write a retraction, he would be fished out and killed. Between March 21 and 27, 2006,Nigeriacarried out a National Population and Housing Census.