The Lagos State Commissioner of Police, Prince Umar Manko, has ordered the arrest and detention of five policemen over the murder of two civilians.
The policemen, who are attached to the Ijora Badia Police Station, were said to have been arrested by Homicide detectives from the State Criminal Investigations Department, Panti, Yaba, Lagos.
Among the five policemen is the officer in charge of operations, Ijora Badia Police Station.
It was gathered that the policemen were not only arrested for the murder of the two civilians, identified as Moses Ayeniro and Iyke (surname yet unknown), but were also arrested for trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the state’s police authority.
After the deceased were killed in a clash with the police, the policemen repeatedly denied seeing, let alone shooting the victims.
An autopsy result has now proved their lies, leading to their current arrest and detention at Panti of the policemen.
Trouble for the five policemen started on December, 14, 2013 after a community member at the Ijora Badia area, identified as Kayode Omojuwa, the Managing Director of Dele Hotel, organised a party where all hell broke loose.
Eyewitnesses’ accounts claimed that the two victims were gunned down by police in the wee hours of the day during a fracas between two youth gangs in the area.
The youth gangs have been identified as Badia and Railway boys.
Their death caused the youths and women in the area stage a protest to the Badia Police Station.
One of the victims was later identified as Moses Ayeniro, a relation to the Managing Director of Chicko International Hotel, another hotel in the area.
The fighting started at a burial remembrance party organised by Ojo to mark his father’s four years remembrance.
During the party, which started on a Saturday night and spilled over to Sunday morning, the members of the two youth gangs, who attended the party, had a confrontation and before people at the party knew what was happening, they had attacked one another with dangerous weapons.
One of the youths, identified simply as Baba, from the Railway Boys’ faction, was said to have been inflicted with severe machete cut on his shoulder.
It was in the heat of the fracas that the police received a distress call and raced to the scene.
But rather than welcome the police intervention, both gangs were said to have attacked the policemen, forcing them to open fire.
Two of the youths were gunned down.
In the course of carrying out further investigation into the matter, the police had arrested Omojuwa, the organizer of the party.
When the dust over the death of the youths settled, Omojuwa had written a petition to Manko, demanding to know the true cause of the youths’ death since the police claimed they did not touch the youths.
Manko was said to have instructed the Deputy Commissioner of Police in charge of Panti, to investigate the matter.
Just when the five policemen, who allegedly committed the crime and attempted to conceal it, felt that the case was dead and buried, autopsy examinations carried out on the corpses at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital revealed that the boys were shot to death.
What further implicated the policemen were the bullets extracted from the corpses.
The bullets belonged to the guns of the policemen.
Attempts to get the police spokesperson in Lagos State, Ngozi Braide, to confirm the arrest of the five policemen proved abortive.
Braide did not pick her calls and did not reply text messages.
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