THE family of Jumoke Oyeleke, a 25-year-old girl killed during the Yoruba Nation rally in Lagos State, has demanded justice as an autopsy carried out on the deceased contradicts an earlier claim by the Lagos State Police Command.
According to Premium Times, the autopsy result, which was carried out by S.S Soyemi, a doctor in the Department of Pathology and Forensic of the Lagos State Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), revealed that Jumoke died of ‘hemopericardium, disruption to the heart and lungs and missile injury to the chest.’
The result also disclosed that the deceased died at 11:30 am, a period the protest was taking place.
Reacting to the autopsy result, the deceased’s uncle Afolabi Wasiu said the family was required by the police to pay the sum of N25,000 for transportation of the corpse for autopsy.
He lamented that the family was yet to receive feedback from the police despite giving assurances that they would get back to the family after the conclusion of their investigation.
“What they said was that they couldn’t find the bullet in her body. That the bullet went out, that is what the autopsy is saying,” he said.
He noted that when they went to request her body on the same day of the incident, the police commander at Ojota asked them to “calm down for them to be able to detect the kind of bullet that penetrated through her, that they were not the only security agencies in that vicinity at the time, that they cannot detect that this was what happened.”
“They said when they start the investigation, they will check the bullet and the number.”
Wasiu said that they had planned to bury Oyeleke on Monday but their lawyer, Ernest Olaoluwa, advised against it.
“Our lawyer said we should not bury her yet. Because they need to get more information about the death, they said it is not just a death that will come and go like that,” he said.
Despite, the testimonies of multiple witnesses that Jumoke was hit by a stray bullet of security operatives who were forcefully dispersing the protesters, the state police command has refused to accept responsibility for the incident.
It rather claimed in a statement that operatives deployed to forcefully stop the protest did not fire any live ammunition at protesters.
“The said corpse was found wrapped and abandoned at a distance, far from Ojota venue of the rally, behind MRS Filling Station, inward Maryland, on the other side of the venue, with dried bloodstains suggesting that the corpse is not fresh.
“After a close look at the corpse, a wound suspected to have been sustained from a sharp object was seen on it.”
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