On
November 20, 2014, every parent’s nightmare became a reality for
42-year-old Ayedun Shitta-Bello. It was a normal Saturday. There was
nothing out of the ordinary that morning that could foretell the tragic
news she was about to hear.
“I did not even have a nightmare or a
bad dream that could make me think that such a terrible thing had
happened,” she told our correspondent.
Barely out of bed that Saturday morning, Shitta-Bello got a call from her brother, Prince Musaliu Buhari.
“Come quick, please, don’t ask why, just come,” she was told on the phone.
Shitta-Bello said apprehension set in as she tried to understand what could have warranted such an early summon.
Our correspondent met Shitta-Bello at
Badore area of Ajah, Lagos, on Wednesday where she spoke of the agony of
the last two months since she learnt that her sons, Abiodun and Ayinde
Oniru (23 and 20 respectively), had died.
The fair complexioned woman, could not
hide her agony during the interview as she kept asking, “Why? Why? Why
would anybody kill my sons? To punish me or what?”
Shitta-Bello and her sons’ father had
parted ways since Abiodun and Ayinde were little but they lived with
their father who had converted from Islam to Christianity.
Saturday PUNCH learnt that the deceased attended a white garment church pastored by one Samuel Olusoji. with their father and step mother.
Two days before the incident (November
18), Abiodun and Ayinde along with their father and step mother were
said to have gone to church for a programme. The church is located at
739, Ori-Oke Ibukun, Ilasan Street, Jakande, Ajah.
Shitta-Bello’s ex-husband and father of
the deceased told the police that he left the church earlier having
performed his own bath but left behind his children and wife in the
church.
According to the statement he gave to
the police, early morning on Saturday, he got a call from his wife who
told him that his two children had drowned during a spiritual bath in a
stream frequently used by the church along Ogombo area of Ajah.
The father of the deceased called his
ex-wife’s brother (Buhari), who raced to the scene in shock and saw his
nephews’ dead bodies lying on the ground.
Screaming inside but trying not to sound
alarming, Buhari dialled his sister’s phone line and told her to come
to her ex-husband’s house right away without giving reasons.
She said, “I just woke up when I
received the call. I quickly put on clothes and went there. I got there
and realised that relations were there as well. I became suspicious.
“I asked what had happened but no one
told me anything initially. I then asked for my children. That was when
they told me they drowned during a spiritual bath. From then on,
everything they told me made no sense. The more I thought about it, the
more it did not add up.”
The church pastor initially fled while the police arrested the assistant pastor of the church.
According to Shitta-Bello, she was told
during investigation by the police that almost 100 other people were
present during the ‘spiritual bath’.
“How can two people drown during a
spiritual bath and they turn out to be siblings? How can anybody expect
me to believe that was a coincidence?” she said.
The grieving mother said sleep had
eluded her since the incident as she always stayed up in the middle of
the night to think about her precious children.
Shitta-Bello has another child from the
man she remarried but lamented that the hope that her two late children
would meet their young sibling would not be fulfilled.
She said, “I called my children around
7pm on Friday, the day before the incident and they told me they were in
church for a programme.
“Few days before then when I visited
them at their father’s house, they did not even want me to leave. But I
promised to come back soon and bring their sister along because they had
not met her before.
“My children had become a source of joy
to me. But they died mysteriously just at the moment they were of age to
fulfil their responsibility to me as a parent.
“I am not saying this because I am
grieving but no one can tell me anything that will make me believe that
they died just by drowning. How could they both drown when people were
there and nobody went in to help? I was told Ayinde went into the water
first and his brother went in to rescue him and they both drowned.”
Saturday PUNCH learnt that the
deceased were scheduled to travel out of the country in a few days that
same November and had even packed their bags.
The bodies of the deceased are still
lying in the mortuary at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital as
investigation into the case continues.
Buhari, the deceased’s uncle, told our correspondent that he believed that there was more to the story of the drowning as well.
“The police are still conducting
investigations. That is why the bodies are still in the mortuary. We
will know what happened when the result of the autopsy conducted on the
bodies comes out,” he said.
The Police Public Relations Officer in
the state, Mr. Kenneth Nwosu, said investigation into the case is still
ongoing at the Department of Criminal Investigations.
“The pastor of the church was tracked down and arrested shortly after the incident last year,” he said.
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