Ayomide Adeleye, the young man who confessed to killing Christianah Idowu, his friend and neighbour, is not in any correctional facility in Lagos State, FIJ has confirmed.

First arrested and remanded in September, rumours of his release began spreading in December, leading friends and family to worry over the state of the murder case against him.

FIJ earlier reported that efforts to verify these claims led the newspaper to insiders in the police force who said they had heard the same claims but information was limited by the Directorate of Public Prosecutions (DPP) and the Nigerian Correctional Service (NCoS).

“The police handed him over to the Ikoyi Prison, but the judiciary is slow in its dealings. The warrant doesn’t expire, so I wonder how he secured release for a murder offence,” they told FIJ.

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FIJ then made some findings in the NCoS and learnt from a credible source with access to records that there were two persons bearing ‘Ayomide Adeleye’ in their custody, but none was charged with murder and both had since been freed.

This source said, “We had one in Ikoyi and one in Kirikiri Medium, but they are no longer with us here. They have been released. None of them was charged with murder or kidnapping.”

When FIJ asked for a reiteration, the source said, “There is no Ayomide Adeleye in any prison in Lagos. Maybe you should ask the police because they are the ones who obtained the remand warrant.”

FIJ made several attempts to reach Benjamin Hundeyin, the Lagos State Police spokesman, but he did not respond to our calls or messages. Muyiwa Adejobi, the Force Public Relations Officer, promised to find out and get back to FIJ.

Adeleye, a 200 Level Philosophy student of the Olabisi Onabanjo University (OOU), Ogun State, confessed in early September to killing Christianah Idowu, a 300 Level student of the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta (FUNAAB).

On September 26, he appeared before Seyi Omodara, a magistrate at the Ogba Magistrate Court, and she granted a remand warrant to the police to detain him at the Ikoyi prison pending when the DPP’s advice becomes available.

FIJ wrote to the DPP three days later, but despite promising to get back to the newspaper, the directorate has yet to do so.