A Nigerian, Gideon Eze, detained for six weeks in Doha, Qatar’s capital city, has cried out to the Federal Government and its relevant agencies to intervene in his case to reverse the injustice done to him.

Eze’s lawyer, Inibehe Effiong, said Eze had boarded Qatar Airways’ flight from Abuja to the United States on May 7, 2025, but had his trip aborted in Doha due to a profiling and mistreatment incident that resulted from a routine airport security check.

Effiong said during the check, security officials claimed to have found items they suspected to be illicit drugs, but which turned out to be a false alarm after being subjected to a series of tests.

He said the tests included chemical swabs, machine analysis, and tongue-tasting as well as two complete searches of my checked luggage and a full strip-search, adding that “every single test result was negative for narcotics.”

Eze, who spoke alongside his lawyer, said that despite the clear evidence of his innocence, the Qatari security personnel escalated the situation.

He added, “I was detained, my passport and phone seized, and my checked luggage forcibly removed from the aircraft and searched twice. Nothing illegal was found.

“I was handcuffed behind my back, driven in a black vehicle, and taken to a detention facility called Duhaill, under the pretext of a ‘final test’ that would take just two hours.

“At the detention center, I was subjected to a degrading strip search. I was stripped completely naked, ordered to jump, squat, and cough, while a device was passed around my genitals and anus. Again, nothing incriminating was found on me.

“I was detained and compelled to sign a report written entirely in Arabic, which falsely declared the harmless stones were ‘cocaine stones. ‘That was how I spent six weeks in detention.

“I later learnt through the Nigerian embassy in Qatar that they had sent the stones for forensic lab analyses during my detention. The analyses surprisingly took six weeks, after which the results came out, still showing the stones were benign and non-narcotic.

“I was ultimately released from custody without any charge or conviction on June 19th, 2025, confirming the complete lack of evidence or legal basis for the original accusation and detention,” he said.

Eze added that days after his release, he found that his U.S. visa was revoked on May 12, 2025, due to his wrongful arrest at the Hammad International Airport, Doha.

He added, “Since I had obtained my U.S. visa as my wife’s dependent, her student visa also got revoked in relation to the case. This even came at a time when she was preparing for her Ph.D. candidacy exam, adding more fuel to the fire already ravaging our lives.”

Eze said that since then, he has made several attempts, both personally and through the Nigerian embassy in Qatar, to obtain case dismissal documents and a copy of the forensic lab results, as key materials that would help him to appeal the visa revocation.

He said that although the Qatari Public Prosecution Department eventually issued a case dismissal document to him, the organisation failed to release the laboratory report.

Eze noted that the many appeal letters he wrote to the US embassy have been unanswered and prayed that the Nigerian government would come to his aid.