Nigeria: A Murder so cruel

BY GBENRO ADESINA/Ibadan 

 A 35-year-old Nigerian graduate, due to marry in less than two months from now, is felled by police bullets in Ibadan

A wedding ceremony was what the family of Sola Adegbeha, a 35-year-old Geography graduate of Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, had in mind. Adegbeha, a livestock farmer, was due to marry his fiancee, a US-based nurse in a little over a month. Now, a funeral is what the family has been forced to prepare for.

On 8 January, Adegbeha, who hailed from Ipele in Ondo State, was shot dead by a police corporal, Julius Ekundayo, at a checkpoint in Ibadan, capital of  Oyo State. The circumstances of his death have provoked conflicting and incoherent narratives by the family and the police.

Adegbeha’s family suspects that the deceased, who left his younger sister’s home at Oluyole area of Ibadan at dawn to keep a business appointment in the Bodija area of the city, was shot because he refused to give money to the cops who flagged down his Mazda 626 car at the checkpoint. After he was shot Adegbeha managed to get to the nearby Group Medical Hospital, where he sought treatment. The family also suspects that the deceased was not promptly attended to because he did not take a police report to the hospital. A security man at the hospital was said to have been told to go to the police station at Jemibewon Road and get a police report. On his way back to the hospital, he was accompanied by some policemen, among whom Adegbeha identified the one who shot him. Adegbeha, however, died shortly afterwards.

Immediately he died, claimed the family, the police, without contacting the family, deposited his body at a morgue. A death certificate issued at 6:30am by the hospital revealed the primary cause of the death as “haemorrhagic shock”, and secondary cause as “gunshot injury at lower back”.

But Mr. Olayiwola Abiodun, an official of the hospital, denied that the hospital demanded a police report. He said it was the hospital that sent a security man to the police station to inform the police of the development. He said, “The doctor was attending to the deceased before he gave up the ghost,” said Olayiwola.

The suspicion of the family that money was the cause of the disagreement between the deceased and the police is based on their claim that Adegbeha had some money on him with which he planned to buy poultry feed.

Police sources claimed that the deceased failed to produce the particulars of his vehicle as well as a proof of ownership and suggested that he wanted to speed off, something that provoked the cop that shot him.

Counsel to the Adegbeha family, Mr. Wasiu Salimon, vowed to ensure that the matter is not swept under the carpet. “We are taking up the matter.  It is sad that police officers hired to protect Nigerians have turned around to be killing us at will,” he said.

What, however, is not in dispute is the identity of the man who pulled the trigger. Mr. Clement Adoda, state Deputy Commissioner of Police, told TheNEWS that the killer corporal is in police detention and will be prosecuted if investigated and found to have acted without discretion.

.This article originally appeared in TheNEWS magazine of 28 January 2013