A victim buried in front of his house
Three words – anguish, fear and helplessness – best described the
atmosphere in Omoku in Ogba/Egbema/Ndoni Local Government Area of Rivers
state on Monday when Premium Times visited the town.
It had been about a week since armed men suspected to be cultists
invaded it, killed some residents and chopped off their heads. Some
streets in the town looked deserted as at 2:30 pm. when a reporter
visited. Security agencies were not seen around the community.
Some residents had fled the town while those who remained locked
themselves up in their homes, peeping through windows to see who was
passing by.
In Ndoni Street, a distraught old man, Benedict Ajie, narrated what
happened that fateful night. He said he heard gunshots on the street at
about 9 pm, and by dawn he found that at a house opposite his own, two
of his kinsmen, two young brothers, had been shot dead.
Mr. Ijie gave the names of the victims as Nwaudo Ijie and Ahiakwo
Ijie. He said in Ndoni Street alone, eight persons were shot dead that
night.
It was at about 10 am that some policemen from Ahoda arrived Omoku,
claiming they were responding to distress calls, Mr. Ijie said.
On Samuel Osere Street, two persons, including a Junior Secondary School class 3 student, were said to have been beheaded. “We can’t run away from our home, we don’t have anywhere to go to,” a female resident of Samuel Osere Street told Premium Times. “We are afraid.”
Benedict Ajie
At 19 Umu-Imeci Street, a handful of old men and women visited a
bereaved family member on condolence. The invaders had descended on the
home of Martin Uge, a retired civil servant, killing three persons,
including his 31-year old son, Elechukwu.
Elechukwu was killed inside his bedroom, right on his bed. The
other two victims, who were tenants in Mr. Uge’s compound, were dragged
from their bedrooms, and shot dead in the street that night, residents
said.
Mr. Uge, 71, said his daughter-in-law received gunshot wound. “Because of fear, I couldn’t look at them (the assailants) because recognising their faces could lead to another thing,” he said of his encounter with the assailants.
Mr. Uge said his son wasn’t involved in active politics, and that
he didn’t know why they killed him. He said the government could stop
the killings if they really wanted to.
In Umu-Eyike Street, two brothers, Eze Izeh and Oge Izeh, were also
gunned down. Late Oge, the older of the brothers, left behind a wife
and two sons.
Near Umu-Imeci Street, Eleanya Ugorji, a bishop at God’s Victorious
Church, said he noticed the corpses of his younger brother, Ekwela, and
the wife, Victoria, outside in the morning after several hours of
gunshots around their home the previous night.
“He (Ekwela) was a politician, that’s all I know about him,” the bishop said. “The wife was a trader.”
In Umuchikere Street, Omoku, one of those beheaded, Emeka, was
buried in a grave right in front of his house. There are video clips
currently in circulation on Facebook and other social media sites,
showing the headless bodies of the victims of the killings.
Late Elechukwu - One of the victims
In one of the videos, three corpses are on the floor, two of them
beheaded, while people, apparently the victims’ relatives, are seen
crying helplessly. “They shot him 11 times,” one of the mourners was heard saying, pointing at a corpse.
A radio presenter in Port Harcourt said of the Omoku killings, “If you google the world ONELGA on the Internet today, the results you’ll get is ‘killing, killing, killing.” ONELGA is the acronym for Ogba/Egbema/Ndoni Local Government Area in Rivers state.
Meanwhile, the All Progressives Congress has claimed that those
killed in Omoku were its members. The party said, Tuesday, that by its
own count, 26 persons were killed, and some of them beheaded.
The chairman of the APC, Davies Ikanya, said a cult group,
Icelanders, invaded the town at night and picked on the party’s members
in the town. Mr. Ikanya said the party publicly alerted the police,
several weeks before the killing, of a plan to kill its members in the
area.
“Our evidence was that following security operations carried
out by the military on 11/1/2016 at the house of one Igwe Ejima Dibia
alias Don Wannie at Aligu village in ONELGA, members of Icelander cult
and their PDP collaborators held a meeting at about 2300hrs at Obohia in
Omoku and concluded that prominent members of the APC will be
eliminated irrespective of whether they live in ONELGA or Port Harcourt
and other locations in the State as long as they are of ONELGA origin,” he said.
The party said less than 24 hours after the alert, its chairman in
Ward 6, simply identified as Owotor, was shot dead on his street. The
police are yet to make public the outcome of their investigation into
the killing of Mr. Owotor till date, Mr. Ikanya said.
He also recalled the recent killing of a former member of the
Rivers State House of Assembly, Monday Eleanya, who was shot dead while
driving out of his residence on Ada George Road, Port Harcourt.
Martin - Father of a victim, Elechukwu
The late Mr. Eleanya represented ONELGA constituency in the Rivers
State House of Assembly between 1999 and 2003 on the ticket of the
Peoples Democratic Party. He recently decamped to the APC.
The APC accused the police of failing to provide security for the
people of Omoku when the gruesome killings took place. It also accused
the police of covering those responsible for the killings.
The party said it was ‘most bizarre’ for the police to hurriedly blame the killings on a supremacy fight between two rival cult groups.
“We are convinced beyond doubt that the Rivers State Police
Command has resorted to a policy of drawing hasty conclusions for the
purpose of either hiding their incompetence or protecting the interests
of sponsors of the killers or both,” the party said in a statement.
But when contacted by Premium Times, Ahmad Mohammad, the Police
Public Relations Officer in the state insisted that the killings arose
from a deadly fight by two rival cult groups in the area.
When asked how the police came by the information that it was a
battle between two cult groups that led to the killings, the police
spokesperson said Omoku had an age-long history of cult violence. Mr.
Mohammad however said he did not know the names of the cult groups that
were involved in the ‘battle for supremacy’ in Omoku.
Late Emeka (Right) and his mother
He also said the police saw 12 corpses, not 26, and that none was
beheaded. Some bereaved family members had told this newspaper that the
victims were beheaded. But when a reporter gave the police spokesperson
that information, he responded, “What we have not seen, we cannot account for (it).”
The police said two suspects had so far been arrested, and that investigation into the incident was ongoing.
The Rivers State Commissioner for Information, Austin Tam-George,
declined to respond to the allegation that the PDP collaborated with the
cultists.
“To comment on this (allegation) would mean to dishonour the dead. No, I can’t do such,” Mr.
Tam-George told Premium Times, while adding that the Rivers State
governor, Nyesom Nwike had urged the people of Omoku to work with the
security agencies to improve security in the area.
“Unfortunately, the police commissioner he (Governor Wike) was
working with was transferred out of the state at a time the state
government was about organizing a security summit in the state,” Mr. Tam-George said.
Source: Premium Times
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