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Police admit killing
Agbeyegbe
�MOPOL redeployed
By Maxwell Oditta
Senior
Correspondent, Lagos
Police authorities have owned
up that their officers killed aviation critic Jerry Agbeygbe, whose life
was snuffed out on October 12, a rare confirmation of that conspiracy
theory already spun by his family members, friends and a sceptic
public.
Lagos State Deputy Police
Commissioner (Operations) John Haruna said in an interview at the weekend
that the suspects within could be named before the end of this
week.
It is indeed a ground breaking
admission by an arm of the security agencies whose responsibility is to
protect the lives as well as properties of the citizens who cough out the
taxes that pay their salaries.
The police often parade their
officers when they kill non-prominent citizens, but they rarely do so when
someone famous is murdered by them deliberately or through �accidental
discharge�.
Haruna said Agbeyegbe was
killed �by mistake� by mobile policemen who are now in custody. They were
apprehended last week.
Granted that he was shot
inadvertently, though the number of pellets used on him creates an
otherwise impression, who made the mistake?
Haruna agreed with the
argument that �only police men on legitimate duty those early hours of
Tuesday, October 12� could have killed anyone by chance error.
Said he: �Mobile policemen
create more problems for the police than conventional policemen. Most of
the accidental killings we have to explain often originated from them.
That is why Commissioner of Police (Israel Ajao) is very angry and has
started posting them out of Lagos in batches. Many have been redeployed
outside Lagos already�.
His remarks thus confirm
widespread belief that mobile policemen in their duty post along the
highway killed Agbeyegbe.
Haruna stressed that Ajao
resolved in a recent correspondence with Force Headquarters, Abuja to
henceforth personally sign the enlistment and commission of mobile police
personnel in the state.
He explained that the alleged
killers would be paraded at a press briefing that would be addressed by
Ajao later this week.
His disclosure comes at a time
the police seem to have left the press in the dark on the progress of the
forensic study on the death, being carried out by the state Criminal
Investigation Department, Panti, Yaba.
On the circumstances in which
Agbeyegbe met his fate, Haruna said the case was not that of an activist
killed on repressive purposes by the state, as being speculated, and
insisted that neither did hired assassins kill him over a land dispute
with some fellows at Alapere, Ketu.
�In the case of Agbeyegbe, we
should avoid speculations. He was not killed by anyone intentionally. At
least, the time of the morning he was killed showed that he could not have
been the victim of an ambush. I am sorry to say that Agbeyegbe was killed
by mistake�, Haruna insisted.
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