A lawyer representing the victims of 31 December, 2016 police shooting at the premises of Chi Industries Limited, Mr. Samuel Ade-Ilori, has accused the Lagos State Police Command of lying in its account of how two casual workers of the company were killed by policemen.
Daniel Olukoya and one other staff were killed by police bullets, while another part-time employee of the company, Victor Ayeri, was wounded. Mr. Ilori told SaharaReporters that he had investigated the incident and discovered that the version of the police and the company were nothing but a salad of lies.
The Lagos State Police Command had claimed that the policemen were provoked into shooting at the workers during a workers’ protest at the company premises. During the protest, claimed the police, the casual workers attacked policemen with caustic soda and in the process, injured a police inspector. The protest, said the police, was sparked by the workers’ anger at the refusal of the management of the company to give them year-end welfare packages like it did to the regular staff of the company.
According to the police, the workers expressed their anger by storming a store, where they took cartons of the company’s products as year-end welfare packages, which they were moving out the premises when the police stopped them.
Speaking with SaharaReporters, Mr. Ilori said his findings showed that contrary to the police account, there was neither a protest by the workers nor an invasion of the store from which the police and the company alleged that products were taken by the workers.
He also denied that the workers provoked the police into using firearms, which led to the death of two workers. The lawyer maintained that policemen were invited to the company premises while workers on night shift were about closing at around 5 am. On arrival, he added, the policemen shot randomly into the air and walls of the company.
“It was in the process of shooting, with the poor workers running for safety, that bullets hit two of them, Daniel Osikoya, who died due to no prompt attention, and Victor Ayeri, who survived,” said Mr. Ilori.
He also said his findings showed that no policeman was attacked and that it was the police that took the two gunshot victims to a nearby hospital.
He wondered why the police, since the day of the incident, have not been able to disclose the identity of the officer attacked if, indeed, there was an attack on him.
While at the hospital, the lawyer further said, the policemen heard that one of them had been wounded, a development that made them dump the victims at the hospital to return to the premises of Chi Industries Limited.
He dismissed the claim by the police that the victims were taken to the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH) for treatment, saying the only interaction they had with the teaching hospital was to deposit Olukoya’s corpse at its mortuary.
“We will not allow the Police to get away with these lies and extra judicial killings,” he vowed The incident attracted the interest of the Lagos State government, which got its Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Cooperative to invite the management of the company to explain the circumstances in which the workers died.
Nigeria Police
BY SAHARA REPORTERS
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment