Rebecca Ejifoma
The Lagos State police have arrested two suspected ritualists, Folake Falade and Emmanuel Gbenga of Mosafejo-Ilogbo, Badagry, Lagos, after passersby discovered them inside a tunnel under the Cele Nicer Bridge in Ijanikin area of Lagos with a decomposing corpse.
The discovery attracted an irate mob which nearly lynched them if not for the quick intervention of policemen drafted from Ijanikin Divisional Police Headquarter, the Lagos Police Public Relations Officer, CSP Chike Oti, disclosed.
The rescue team thereafter searched the tunnel and arrested one Emmanuel Gbenga believed to be an accomplice of the female suspect while the third suspect who escaped from the tunnel to avoid being arrested was caught by an irate mob who set him ablaze.
Meanwhile, the State Commissioner of Police, Imohimi Edgal, has directed the Divisional Police Officer in charge of Ijanikin to cordon off the scene.
He further instructed that the DPO ensured that the remains found in the tunnel were not tampered with pending the arrival of police forensic experts expected at the scene Tuesday to examine the corpse, tunnel and other exhibits found there.
The CP, however, said it was regrettable that despite the various town hall meetings he held to sensitise communities in the state to the evil of jungle justice, some people at Olorunshogo community constituted themselves into a mob.
“They took laws into their hands by killing one of the suspects who might have been very useful in the ongoing investigation had they handed him over to the police,” he decried.
Therefore, he warned that anybody found to have participated in the killing of the yet-to-be-identified man will be arrested and charged for murder to serve as a deterrent to others with penchant for taking the law into their own hands.
