By Esther Onyegbula
In the past four weeks, the community of Anibaba, Bugon Filling Station and Water Corporation, Obafemi Awolowo Road, Ikorodu has been in the news for all the wrong reasons.
This came after a bloated female corpse was discovered on Thursday, December 3; six others on Saturday, December 5, 2015; and two more on Tuesday, December 15.
The mystery surrounding the deaths has raised a lot of dust, especially because of the unseemly conspiracy of silence that has enveloped the community since the first discovery.
It was gathered that residents had woken up to find the first corpse in Anibaba Canal, close to Andrew Street, that Thursday. By Sunday, five other female corpses were discovered at Agunbiade Street at Itupatie.
While residents were trying to fathom the mystery surrounding the corpses that were discovered in the community, two other corpses were found on Tuesday, December 15 down Anibaba. While one was dumped inside the drainage system, the other was lying inside the bush.
Lifeless inside the bush
Unlike the other six corpses initially recovered, the last two corpses were fresh. One of the corpses had blood stains on its nose and mouth while the other one inside the drainage was naked, but with no part of the body missing. Another mystery is that the bags and valuables belonging to the two victims were found next to their bodies.
When Sunday Vanguard visited the community, there was this evident air of silence as residents, for reasons best known to them, refused to talk about the incidents. Most of the residents, kept saying they weren’t around when the corpses were found.
According to Iya Beji, a resident at Agunbiade Street, who spoke to Sunday Vanguard, “This is really strange; it is strange because they are all females. There was no way the first six corpses that were recovered on Thursday and Sunday could be identified because they were all bloated except through forensic study.
“But the last two corpses were very fresh. One of the corpses found last Tuesday, in the bush, had blood in the nostrils and mouth. Whatsoever is the cause of the death is definitely a very painful one.
“Even if these victims were call girls, their killers should have spared them. They would have slept with them without paying them instead of killing them. Besides, their bags, clothes and belongings were found where they were dumped.”
All the community did, on discovering the corpses, was to alert the police who came to recover the corpses. They haven’t made any effort to know how the female corpses got to the canal.
Lamenting the strange corpses, another resident, Umoru Adisa, who lives close to the Water Corporation, Awolowo Way, said: “We don’t know what is happening in this community any more. This morning, the police recovered two more bodies.
“Between last Sunday and now, they have recovered nine bodies. Something is definitely wrong somewhere, as this is getting out of hand. Government needs to investigate this thoroughly because we don’t know what is happening anymore.”
A landlord in the area, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said: “It is surprising that the community leaders have not taken any step to clean the land, considering the fact that, that same canal at Anibaba is used by some traditional worshippers in the community. At least, we expect them to have done Oro ritual which is used to cleanse the land in times like this.”
Confirming the incidents, Director, Lagos State Environment Health Monitoring Unit (LSEHMU), Dr Enigbokan Olakunle, said the unit, on Monday, recovered the mutilated body of a female which was later taken to the mortuary.
Mutilated body
On the fresh bodies also recovered, Enigbokan said LSEHMU was not informed about the corpses but the unit learned that the police recovered and later took the bodies away.
Also confirming the reports, a leader of the popular vigilante group, known as Onyabo, Chief Kamoru Bomabata, said that one of the corpses, a female, was found in a canal near ‘two hotels (names withheld).
Also confirming the incident, Lagos State Police spokesman, DSP Joseph Offor, told Sunday Vanguard that policemen recovered six corpses from Anibaba River in Ikorodu area of Lagos. “By the time the corpses were discovered, their bodies had started decomposing,” he said.
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