Members of a two-month-old Lagos special security team named ‘Anti-Oneway and Other Traffic Offenders Squad’ have gunned down a young man on Tuesday, a protesting mob is alleging.

A short video circulating on social media shows a youth lying dead in a pool of blood behind a green-coloured Sienna car.

The protesters spoke some agonizing words with a tinge of pidgin English, one saying:
“He is not a Yahoo boy… Person wey dey go work. You killed him.

The protesters, some of whom are women, cried bitterly. They were seen moving en masse around the Oshodi expressway of Lagos state.

Muyiwa Adejobi, the Lagos police spokesman, however, denied the allegation of murder, saying: “It is a case of a hit-and-run accident. Anybody can allege. The DPO in-charge of the area has sent in the details of the accident and we couldn’t trace the vehicle.

“Anybody who has contrary submission can come forward with it. It is a case of an accident and has nothing involving the Oshodi police taskforce.

“Anybody can allege. It is because of the nature of what we do. That’s how they allege SARS [sic] (now disbanded). The Taskforce is enforcing the law. It is a common thing for people to allege them [sic] because they don’t like what they (the latter) do’, he insisted.

The squad, set up in December 2020 by the Commissioner of Police, Mr. Hakeem Odumosu, at the instance of Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, was saddled with the specific mandate to arrest and impound vehicles plying one-way BRT lanes and also motorcyclists operating in restricted areas.