A Lagos High Court in Ikeja on Wednesday sentenced four members of the O’odua Peoples’ Congress to two years imprisonment for dismembering the corpse of one Ibrahim Akande in Ipaja area of Lagos in 2005.
The convicts were said to have carried out the act after Akande was shot dead by one of them.They were said to have disposed parts of the body in a nearby canal.
One of the convicts, who admitted in his statement to the police that they dismembered the body to make the deceased unidentifiable, was arrested with the corpse’s head.
Justice Lateefat Okunnu, in her judgment, said the jail terms of the convicts - Mustapha Gbadamosi, Musibau Yekini, Saka Raji and Sundy Opeyemi - would take effect from May 2005, when they were taken into custody.
The Lagos State Directorate of Public Prosecution had, among other three counts, charged them for “misconduct with regard to the deceased’s corpse.”
The prosecution had stated that “they improperly or indecently interfered with, and treated with indignity, the body of Ibrahim Akande.”
Okunnu, however, discharged and acquitted the convicts on the counts of murder and accessory to the murder.
She said the prosecution failed to prove the charges of murder and accessory to murder against the convicts.
Sunday, who was specifically charged with unlawful possession of the head and hands of the deceased for diabolical purpose was also discharged and acquitted of the offence.
The judge said it was evident from Sunday’s statement to the police that the convicts participated in decapitating the body.
Okunnu said the prosecution, was able to prove the charge of “misconduct with regard to the corpse of Akande” in line with Section 242(1)(b) of the Criminal Code Law.
But she said the prosecution failed to prove the charge of murder, accessories to the murder and unlawful possession of Akande’s head.
She said the possession of human head, according to Section 392A of the Criminal Code Law, became an offence if it was with “the intention that such head or skull shall be possessed ...as a trophy, juju or charm”.
According to Okunnu, the prosecution failed to prove that Sunday, who kept the head and hands of the deceased in a bag at the refuse dump in his yard, was having such intention as provided for in Section 392A of the Criminal Code Law.
Gbadamosi, who faced the murder charge alone, said he shot the deceased after he (Akande) dodged an earlier one.
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