The Abia State Police Command has exonerated two suspects, Chibuike Anibuife , 25, and Jonathan Nwogu, 45, allegedly caught at Osisioma Junction, Aba, with a corpse of a three- year-old girl concealed in a sack.
Police Public Relations Officer, Geoffrey Ogbonna, told The PUNCH at the Command’s headquarters in Umuahia that the suspects had been thoroughly investigated and found to be innocent.
He said the corpse was genuinely handed over to them by the father of the deceased for for burial.
The state’s Commandant of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, Mr. Andy Dateer, had last week paraded the suspects, saying his men on patrol rescued the men from being lynched by a curious mob at Aba, when the content of the sack was discovered to be the lifeless body of a child.
NSCDC had said the mob was infuriated by the strange content of the sac and demanded explanations from the men but their failure to provide satisfactory answer made the mob descend on them.
The NSCDC boss said the suspects would be handed over to the police for proper investigations, explaining that his men only rescued them from the angry mob so that the truth of their mission could be unravelled.
But another NSCDC source confided in The PUNCH that the suspects had told security agents when they were arrested that they were only contacted by the father of the deceased child to help him bury the corpse in a ‘boro pit’ where one of the suspects was working.
According to the source, the suspects later took NSCDC operatives to a hospital in Aba where they were given the corpse to burry but a nurse at the hospital on sighting the security agents denied that the corpse was their patient but later admitted that the deceased actually died while receiving treatment .
Request by the security agents to see the doctor in charge, according to the source, was turned down by the nurse who rather reportedly offered N20,000 allegedly on the doctor’s instruction.
The suspects had during an interview with our correspondent denied any involvement in the child’s death or ritual motive as being insinuated by the mob.
While the prime suspect, Nwogu, said he was contacted by the father of the deceased to bury the corpse in a ” boro pit” at a fee of N2000, Anibuife said he only wanted to assist Nwogu on the request of a man from the mob.
Meanwhile , police said detectives later went to the hospital and verified that the deceased died while receiving treatment, adding that they would soon be released.
According to police, the father of the deceased, Mike Kanu Ogbonna returned from Togo with the sick child for medication, but handed the corpse over to his elder brother, Ikeoha Ogbonna, for burial after the child died and returned to Togo to re-join the family.
The 68-year-old elder brother of the deceased’s father told PUNCH Metro that his brother only gave him N8000 for the burial but he decided to contact the suspect to help bury the corpse in Aba to save them the inconveniences of traveling to their Ovim Isuikwuato home town.
Asked why he bolted when the suspects were intercepted by the mob, he said he had left the scene after settling with the suspect to enable him to meet up with another funeral event in the village before trouble started.
Comments
Post a Comment