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 Daily Independent Online.
* Monday, August 09, 2004.
Police to publish register of
bodies at Okija shrine
By Okey Maduforo
Correspondent, Awka
Relatives of
missing people in Anambra State may soon heave a sigh of relief as the
police plan to publish the 10 registers containing the names of those
whose bodies were recovered from the Okija shrine.
State Police Commissioner
Felix Ogbandu said in an interview at the weekend that some disappeared
in mysterious circumstances thereby throwing their families into despair.
The publication would indicate
the home and business addresses, if any, of those whose bodies were
recovered - but Ogbandu did not say if the relatives would be allowed to carry the
bodies for proper burial.
The Special Anti-Robbery Squad
(SARS) intends to continue the raid of all the shrines in Okija so as to
bring to book those involved in ritual killings.
Said Ogbandu: “The raid will
continue for sometime and it is our desire to ensure that all those
involved are brought to book. They will have to explain what they were
doing with all those bodies and skulls. We may also publish the names in
the registers that were recovered during the raid for identification”.
The police are only doing
their job by raiding the shrine, he argued, and not portraying the Igbo
as a barbaric people. That was his reaction to a statement credited to
Ohaneze Ndigbo Secretary General Joe Achuzia that the police have no
business raiding shrines and portraying Igbos as barbaric.
Ogbandu said Achuzia is
entitled to his views.
“We have not made the Igbo
look barbaric. Only a few people are staining the image of the Igbo by
going into dirty and shameful rituals. The Igbo are a hardworking and
enterprising people. They have contributed to the socio-economic
development of this country and they should not be seen as a ritualistic
or fetish people,” he added.
Months before the raid, a
professor in one of the universities in the South East, whose name is not
mentioned, was summoned to the shrine by a man who alleged that the he
had offended him.
The university don reported
the matter to the police who arrested the man and detained him before the
raid. The matter is still pending at the magistrate court in Awka.
It was learnt that efforts to
withdraw it from the court were unsuccessful because the police want to
use the case to strengthen their claim of ritual killings at the Okija
shrine.
A source said that last
Tuesday, before the raid, most senior police officers of Igbo extraction
developed cold feet as they complained of one ailment or another to avoid having to join
the commandos who swooped on the shrine.
They thought as Igbos, the
raid may affect them spiritually.
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