Published 17th Mar, 2022

By Emmanuel Uti

Samuel Ajayi, a student at the University of Nsukka, has narrated how his brother, Samson Ajayi, who worked at a construction site belonging to Victoria Crest, Lekki, Lagos, following an industrial action embarked upon by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), mysteriously went missing.

Ajayi told FIJ that one of his brother’s co-workers called his mother on March 9 to tell her that no one had seen Samson since the previous night.

Ajayi called the people on the site to find out what had happened to his brother, but he heard too many accounts.

He said one told him a security official saw Samson leave the construction site. and another told him he left the site with an unidentified person who made a call in front of the gate.

“No one attempted to conduct a search. The only conclusion drawn was that he went to another construction site to work. So, we waited till he got back. After waiting until midnight with no sign of return, we headed to the site the next day,” Ajayi told FIJ.

The following day, Ajayi, his mother, uncle, and his uncle’s fiancée stormed the site and asked the engineer where Samson had slept on the site.

Ajayi said they searched for clues about Samson’s whereabouts after the engineer showed the family where he had slept.

He said while they searched, they found his phone. Immediately, he and his mother set out for a police station in Ajah, while his uncle’s fiancée stayed back.

“As we were explaining the situation to Inspector Titi, the site engineer called to inform us that Samson had returned to the site,” Ajayi said.

“We told him to give Samson the phone, but he refused. Instead, he told us to return to the site. We immediately called my uncle’s fiancée, telling her what the site engineer said. She said no one told her anything about it as she was still on the site. She also said she could not find the engineer anymore.”

Ajayi said when he and his mother got back to the site, they met engineers and some other people who informed them they had found his corpse next to an enclosed water body.

As they rushed to where the corpse lay, Ajayi said he realised that the body was someone else’s. But a few metres from the corpse were some clothes and footwear belonging to Samson.

“We could not help but suspect foul play. We took pictures of the corpse alongside the clothes and headed back to the site with the inspector to ask more questions,” he said.

“The police asked some of the security men at the site what they knew about the issue, but what they said was not congruent with what they told us earlier.”

Ajayi said one Moshood, who said he often shared Samson’s mosquito net and slept next to him, told him that he saw him leave Wednesday morning around 11 am.

He said, “Moshood indicated that they waved at each other and, at that moment, noticed the clothes Samson had on. He confirmed that the clothes we saw at the beach were the ones Samson had on that day”.

Ajayi said he tried to call the security guards to go along with the inspector to the site, but one of them insisted that he was not moving an inch.

The Divisional Police Officer at the Ajah Police Station heard the case and transferred them to Ogombo Police Station, saying it was not within his jurisdiction.

On March 11, Ajayi, the Divisional Crime Officer (DCO) and another police officer from Ogombo Police Station went to the site to check Samson’s property. But they found out that someone had ransacked the property they kept together the previous day.

“The DCO, while questioning the security, adjudged that Moshood was not coherent in his statements. We then headed to the police station, where we spent hours trying to mobilise the police for arrest based on the suspicion that they abducted Samson. But they kept on with a guile approach to avoid and delay the issue,” he said.

Ajayi said Abiodun Alabi, the Lagos State Commissioner of Police, transferred the issue to the State Criminal Investigation Department at Panti, Yaba. Today, the CID gave instructions to arrest the people on the site.

When FIJ called Adekunle Ajisebutu, who was still the Lagos State Police spokesperson at the time, he did not answer his calls. At press time, he had not replied to a text sent to his phone.

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