Linda Ikeji Media has announced the release of The Night of June 7th, a new feature film inspired by one of the most consequential cases of police brutality in Nigeria’s history. The film opens in cinemas nationwide on Thursday 28th August 2026 and is directed by Toka Mcbaror from a screenplay written and produced by Linda Ikeji herself. It is distributed by Nile Distribution and marks Linda Ikeji Media’s return to Nigerian theatres.
The film draws its story from the events of the night of 7th June 2005, when six young Nigerians lost their lives at the hands of police officers in Abuja in what became one of the most widely documented cases of extrajudicial killing in the country’s post-independence history. The six victims were Ifeanyi Ozor, Chinedu Meniru, Augustina Arebun, Anthony Nwokike, Paulinus Ogbonna, and Ekene Isaac Mgbe, all traders in their early to mid-twenties who were returning from a night out when they encountered a police patrol at a checkpoint along Gimbiya Street in Garki, Abuja.
What triggered the killing, according to evidence that emerged during years of judicial proceedings, was a personal slight. Earlier that night, a Deputy Commissioner of Police named Danjuma Ibrahim had made advances toward Augustina Arebun at the club the group was leaving. She turned him down. By the time the group reached the checkpoint, Ibrahim had allegedly radioed ahead to the officers on patrol, claiming he had sighted armed robbers. All six were shot dead. A seventh person who survived the initial attack was tracked down and killed the following morning.
The case provoked immediate national outrage. A judicial commission of inquiry was set up and its findings were damning. The commission established that the victims posed no threat to the officers, that the killings were ordered and supervised at a senior level, and that a police witness who was due to testify before the administrative board of inquiry died under suspicious circumstances the night before he was to appear. Despite those findings, it took twelve years for the matter to reach a court judgment. In March 2017, Justice Ishaq Bello of the FCT High Court sentenced two junior officers, Ezekiel Acheneje and Emmanuel Baba, to death for the murders of two of the six victims. Three other officers were acquitted for lack of evidence, and a sixth suspect was never brought to trial at all. The DCP who the convicted officers, the police panel of inquiry, and the judicial commission all identified as the person who plotted, ordered, and supervised the killings was controversially acquitted and has since been reinstated into the Nigerian Police Force, promoted, and paid all outstanding salary arrears dating back to 2005.
The film features a cast led by Gideon Okeke, Femi Branch, Ali Nuhu, and Charles Lenny. Speaking on the project, Linda Ikeji said the film belongs to every Nigerian who refused to forget what happened that night and described it as a reckoning more than a film. Director Toka Mcbaror said the production team approached the material with the full weight it deserved, and that audiences should come prepared to feel everything.
