Okoro
Policemen
attached to the Federal Special Anti-Robbery Squad have been accused of
killing a 46-year-old petty trader in Ijaye-Ojokoro, Lagos State.
The deceased, Eze Okoro, was killed last Friday while the policemen were on an anti-robbery operation.
The deceased’s wife ,Ugonna, alleged that
the policemen snuffed out the life of Eze few metres from his residence
at 1 Oguntolu Street, Ijaiye-Ojokoro.
Ugonna said her husband of over 15 years
had just finished eating and had gone to relax with a neighbour, Chinedu
Nnwanu, and his pregnant wife, Nneka as he usually did when there was
power outage at night.
She said, “My husband had just finished
having dinner and he stepped outside to see our neighbours who live
opposite our house. They usually relax outside whenever there is power
outage.
“A few minutes before 11pm, we heard
sporadic gunshots and out of panic, I held unto my seven-year-old son
and ran for cover. Few minutes later when the shooting abated, I tried
to reach my husband on his mobile phone but he was not picking it up.”
Ugonna said at that point she started to imagine that something was amiss.
“I summoned courage and stepped out of
the compound and immediately noticed that my husband and his friends
were not at the spot. I started yelling out my husband’s name but there
was no answer,” she said.
She said after some time, some neighbours
informed her that from their windows, they observed some policemen
carrying a man whom they suspected was lifeless into their vehicle.
In a state of confusion, she was able to
pull a call through to some of her siblings and that of her husband who
immediately formed a search party for their relation and the policemen
who were alleged to have taken away the body
She said they visited the Ijaye-Ojokoro
Police Station under whose jurisdiction the incident occurred but all
attempts to locate her husband proved abortive.
“Our search that night failed to yield
the expected result as the officers on duty claimed that no such
incident was ever reported to them neither had any team of policemen
told them that they were operating in the area,” she said.
Eze’s widow said the following day, some
employees of a hotel in the area told her that the policemen who had
come to operate the previous night were from the Federal SARS.
She said she was told by a senior officer
that her husband was killed in error and that his corpse had been taken
to Yaba Military Hospital’s morgue.
“On getting to Federal SARS command, some
junior officers apparently wanting to cover up their colleagues’ error
denied the command’s complicity in the killing. However, a senior
officer intervened by not only admitting that they killed Eze in error,
but informed that his corpse was deposited at the Yaba Military
Hospital’s morgue,” she said.
A resident, who craved anonymity, said
the policemen had also attempted to kill others in the area after
mistaking them for robbers but Eze was the only unfortunate person.
He said, “When the shooting started, Eze
and his friends were running helter-skelter. The policemen first of all
approached Nneka but she immediately shouted ‘please don’t shoot me, I
am pregnant’. That was how she and her husband were spared.
“After Nneka and Chinedu got inside, we
heard Eze begging the policemen and shouting that he was not a thief but
the policemen obviously did not believe him because we heard gunshots
soon after.”
Eze’s widow called on the police authorities to make sure that her husband’s killers were brought to justice.
When contacted on the telephone, the
spokesman for the Federal SARS, Lekan Ogundare, said he was not aware of
the incident but promised to find out.
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