A widow, Mrs Tolulope Opeyeniyi, on Saturday narrated to the Lagos State Judicial Panel of Inquiry probing allegations of brutality against men of the disbanded police Special Anti-Robbery Squad how one Sergeant Jide Akintola attached to the Sabo Police Station in Lagos shot dead her husband, Olusegun Opeyemi, on August 19, 2007.
The widow told the retired Justice Doris Okuwobi-led panel that her husband, who worked for a telecommunications company, Celtel, at the time, was on official duty, riding in the company’s vehicle when he was shot by the policeman around the University of Lagos area.
She said, “On that fateful day, he went on an official assignment to UNILAG. He told me he was going to the University of Lagos. He went in his official car. On his way back, he was stopped by the police. I don’t know if there was an argument, the police(man) shot his vehicle’s tyre, forced the door of the car open, and shot him in the left side of his chest.
“The policeman then realised he was an innocent man; he was taken to the military hospital at Yaba but he gave up the ghost.”
The widow said the corpse of her husband was evacuated by the police to the morgue of the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital.
“To my surprise, they wrote on his body that he was an unknown person,” she said.
She added that an autopsy conducted on August 23, 2007, confirmed that her husband died of gunshot.
“The policeman, who shot my husband, was from Sabo Police Station. The policeman that shot my husband was Jide Akintola, Force No. 32405 and the DPO of Sabo Police Station at the time was Samuel Olukayode.”
The widow, who broke down in tears, said she was a nursing mother when her husband was killed two years after their marriage, adding that life had been difficult for her trying to raise their two children alone.
She said she lives in a rented apartment in Ikorodu and she had been given a notice to quit over the inability to pay her rent. She added that paying her daughters’ school fees had also become difficult.
When the police counsel, Cyril Ejiofor, under cross-examination asked what evidence she had that a policeman killed her husband, the widow said, “The day the police shot my husband, fine I was not there, but that day was a terrible day, people wanted to burn the police station.”
Also mounting the witness stand, the father of the deceased, Michael Openiyi, a 71-year-old retired soldier, said when the news of his son’s death was broken to him, he went to the Sabo Police Station with a crowd and met with the DPO.
The septuagenarian said, “He (DPO) gave us audience; he narrated how the whole thing happened. He told me it happened at the University of Lagos and ended by telling me to go and see the corpse of my son at the Lagos State Hospital on the Island.
“I told him I wanted to see the policeman who shot my son and he brought out Jide Akintola from the cell. I requested for a bible and I used it to pray before everybody that God would give judgment.”
Asked by the family lawyer, Babatunde Adefila, what he wanted the panel to do for him, the old man said, “I am 71 years old, nobody is taking care of me; if my son is alive, it will not be so.
“I want justice to be done. The welfare of the children of the late Olusegun Openiyi is very paramount to me. He left his wife, his aged mother, and myself; nobody to care for us and we are suffering.”
Credit: Punch