One Thursday almost 20 years ago, on the 19th of September 1996, during the brutal regime of the late General Sani Abacha, something
happened in Nigeria that shocked the entire world. In the usually calm
and serene city of Owerri, capital of the country’s southeastern state
of Imo, an 11-year-old boy named Anthony Ikechukwu Okoronkwo was
meandering his way through the streets of the city with his precious
tray of merchandise playfully balanced on his head. The little boy was
hawking boiled groundnuts, which was his routine, the same condemned
destiny for millions of other Nigerian kids today. But in his infantile
innocence, the little boy was only doing what he was ordered to do by
his parents. He strolled along, selling his groundnuts for peanuts to
whoever wanted to buy. When he got to Amakohia area of Owerri, his eyes
lit up with joy as a customer beckoned on him to approach. That
‘customer’ was named Innocent Ekeanyanwu, aged 32.
The boy was called into the famous Otokoto Hotel and the little
groundnut seller was visibly very excited, since it was a hotel, it
meant that the new ‘customer’ would probably be buying plenty groundnuts
which will mean more money to take home to make his parents happy and
assist his struggling family. As he sauntered into the central lobby and
reception area of the hotel, he must have given a cute boyish smile as
he was told to sit and wait a bit. While waiting, the boy was treated
like a guest, he was given a bottle of Coca-Cola to cool off from the
punishing heat of tropical Africa. As every innocent boy of his age
would react, he quickly took the bottle of Coke and gulped it down with
relish.
For
many Nigerian kids, drinking a bottle of Coca-Cola inside the lobby of a
hotel was more than a dream come true. Made to feel at home, he must
have been wondering how nice his new and unusually receptive customers
were. As he was sipping his soft drink and taking a look at the
glittering surrounding of the hotel, he could have imagined having a
hotel of his own too later in the future. As he was dreaming, his vision
became blurry and the sounds around him became muzzled and dull. In a
matter of minutes, he dozed off, never to wake up again. His tray full
of groundnuts was lying in a corner.
Observing the boy from a safe distance was the man who had called him
to buy his groundnuts. He had spiked the boy’s drink and once he saw he
was asleep, he took the limp body of the drugged lad into one of the
hotel rooms and what followed next remains one of the most evil things
anyone can ever dream up. A sharp cutlass emerged from nowhere and the
boy’s head was severed from his body. He was beheaded in a matter of
minutes. Passersby outside the hotel had absolutely no idea of what was
going on inside the ‘high-brow’ hotel. After the boy’s head was cut off,
they proceeded to disembowel his torso and removed his liver and other
parts they needed. They were not done yet, his genitals were not spared
as well. After he was done butchering the boy, he sorted out the organs,
packed his head inside a polythene bag and they made a shallow grave
where they hurriedly buried his mangled remains. Of course, the boy’s
parents somewhere in the city had no idea their little boy had just been
gruesomely murdered. Ekeanyanwu then took the polythene bag containing
the head and headed for the next destination: to the house of the man
who needed the fresh head.
THE OTOKOTO HOTEL
At
the time of its existence, Otokoto Hotel was located in an upscale area
of Owerri, specifically the Amakohia side, and it was a favourite
location for the rich and wealthy youths to meet, drink and have all
manners of fun. Duru’s hotel was made up of three buildings, (three,
five and six stories each, one behind the other). It was owned by Chief
Vincent Duru, the father of Obidiozor Duru, the leader of the Black
Scorpions secret cult responsible for a spate of robberies and
kidnapping of children in the state. All of Owerri placed the Durus
under their radar and surveillance, with rumours all over the place
about their nefarious activities.
BACKGROUND TO THE STORY
Before this horrible incident, the people of Owerri (Ndi Owerre)
were already very mad at the bizarre actions of some loud, extremely
powerful and obscenely wealthy individuals in the state. These people
were highly-connected and oppressed everyone where they went. Rumours
were all over the place as to their very dark dealings and even the
possibility of ritual murders and killings but no one really had any
hard evidence yet or probably those who had it were too jittery to say
anything. Whatever the case, these rich people who had no really
tangible or easily traceable sources of wealth kept on living large and
instilling an atmosphere of terror and fear on the Owerri populace. This
was how Owerri was described at that time:
‘Luxurious
commodities also became available in Owerri during the early 1990s, but
mostly through a set of exclusive shops. These shops catered to members
of their owners’ class: the newly affluent and generally youthful
social elites of the town. Besides the arrival of airplanes in Owerri’s
skies for the first time since Federalist bombing attacks during the
late 1960s, the town’s bicycles and decrepit Peugeot 504 taxis now
shared its potholed streets with the extraordinarily expensive
automobiles and sports utility vehicles of the nouveaux riches. While
the poorest Owerri indigenes listened to Igbo-languages programs on
their radios and visited more wealthy relatives to watch frequently
disrupted local television programming or videos, the town’s mansions
were equipped with generators providing constant power, satellite
dishes, video discs, and giant-screen televisions showing current
international news, business reports, dramas, sitcoms, and music and
movie programming from Great Britain and the United States.
By 1996, Ndi Owerre (Owerri indigenes) could, indeed, see what they had
been missing before airport prosperity, but for most of them this was
little more than a glimpse through the ornate gates of elite mansions or
into shops whose goods had price tags the equivalent of several months’
earnings. Since a number of the town’s parvenu millionaires were not
ndi owerre themselves, old ideals of reciprocity between wealthy and
poorer clan members did not seem to apply under the new regime. This
lack of reciprocity was especially felt as the young elites took titles
and demonstrated their dollar/naira power at public, ‘cultural’ events
like masquerade outings, weddings and funerals. Successful business
entrepreneurship in 1990s….build lavish houses, and flaunt their riches
in the faces of their suffering neighbours. When the question was posed
about the origins of such untoward wealth, two possibilities beyond
legitimate entrepreneurship presented themselves to the Owerri
imaginary. First, the money could be the ill-gotten gains of Nigeria’s
emerging culture of drug couriership and weapons sales. Second, and even
more frighteningly, the money could be the product of the worst type of
crime: the direct exploitation of children, whether as targets for
parental extortion or as targets for money magic, a practice otherwise
known in Nigerian Anglophone circles as’ritual murder’.’
That
was a description of the atmosphere of Owerri of that time. And yes,
the oppression by the wealthy was real. They flaunted their questionable
wealth in the most nauseating manner, took all the chieftaincy titles,
moved around with armed teams of police and soldiers harassing everyone
on the roads, their cars had special and customized plates and any
motorist who dared to protest got the beating of his life. These gods
were virtually untouchable until everything scattered.
When the people heard of what happened inside the hotel to the boy,
Owerri exploded with anger and resentment that had been piling up for
years. For two straight days, the people of Owerri trooped out in their
thousands, protesting and rioting. Not even the strong-arm tactics of
the Imo State military administrator, Colonel Tanko Zubair, could stop
them (the administration of the former military governor Navy Captain
James Aneke was already seen as corrupt, 419-based and even complicit in
the protection of the Otokoto men while he was in office). They simply
ran amok and the national and international media focused on the Owerri
riots of 24th and 25th of September, 1996, also known as the Otokoto riots, the people felt they had had more than enough.
Any
property suspected to belong to the ’Otokoto men’ were set ablaze, from
posh hotels to luxury supermarkets, their flashy automobiles, palatial
mansions, everything was destroyed and burnt to the ground. A more
detailed description of the riots is given in the subsequent sections.
Any suspected member of the Otokoto gang was lynched. Prior to the
riots, the youthful members of the Otokoto gang and other secret
societies (believed to be offshoots of campus secret cults) involved in
ritual killings went everywhere oppressing others with their ill-gotten
wealth making other hardworking youths look clueless and silly. The mob
action of the Owerri people was described thus by Declan Okpalaeke in
the Echoes of Otokoto below:
‘Members
of the irate mob arrogated to themselves the power of the judge and
jury. It was for them, apparently, an opportunity for a putsch, for a
cleansing of their once peaceful town. And they went about it with
maddening fury. They pointed out magnificent buildings within the city
suspected to belong to fraudsters and kidnappers. And once fingered,
such buildings were marched upon were marched upon and torched with
exotic cars and other properties destroyed, their owners pronounced
guilty by the mob. As the crowd moved from one part of the town to
another, more people joined in the act of fury and more victims fell to
its jungle justice.’
The
Owerri public had no faith in the police and as a matter of fact, the
commissioner of police at that time, David Abure, was seen as the
personification of corruption who wined and dined with the evil ones.
But how did the news of the brutal hotel killings leak out to the
public?
OWERRI EXPLODES: THE SHOCKING DISCOVERY
After the grisly murder of the little Okoronkwo by Mr. Innocent
Ekeanyanwu (what a name, innocent indeed), he left the hotel to deliver
the head where it was needed. It was the motorcycle operator named Opara
who took him to his destination in Eziama who realized that was his
passenger was carrying inside the polythene bag was actually a fresh
human head. It was still dripping with blood. When he alighted, the
motorcyclist alerted the police who then intercepted Ekeanyanwu on his
way back in a Peugeot 504 car, he was carrying the head with him in the
polythene bag. Opara would later testify in court.
With
the motorcycle he took earlier, he was going to the residence of a
highly-influential figure named Chief Leonard Unaogu at Eziama, Ikeduru
Local Council Area with the head but upon arriving, he was told Mr.
Unaogu had gone to Lagos. So Ekeanyanwu had no other option but to
return to Owerri with the boy’s head. When it was time to take the
headless body of Ikechukwu to the local mortuary, Owerri residents
trooped out of their homes, it was a massive procession and they
protested all the way. They stayed around and within the hotel premises
and waited for the police to confirm that it was indeed a ritual murder.
Some other Owerri residents kept watch in front of the medical center,
watching everything and also waiting for the confirmation of a ritual
murder from either the morgue or the police. But the notice was to
eventually come from the Imo State television station. Suspicion was
already thick in the air and anyone could smell the tension. It was
Owerri people versus some of the most devilish forms of humanity in
their midst.
It was in this midst of this tension that the local media station made
its miscalculation. They showed the image of Innocent Ekeanyanwu holding
the head of his victim. The goal of the media was to assure the people,
assuage public fear, ask the public to help identify the boy and show
official transparency but what followed next was a catastrophe. All hell
broke loose as the enraged people of Owerri went haywire after the
image was first broadcast on the 24th of
September. All Owerri residents abandoned their businesses and
congregated at the town’s central marketplace. It was there they decided
on the next plan of action and outlined their strategies to deal with
the Otokoto ‘headhunters’. The news spread rapidly and before long,
every home in Owerri had either of the news or seen the image of
Okoronkwo’s head or his shallow grave. Unemployed and disgruntled young
men took over the parks and issued threats to the Owerri millionaires.
From the Owerri main market, the riots exploded and spread.
The
pattern of destruction was neat. The rampaging crowd first went to the
morgue and from there, they rushed to the Otokoto Hotel and burnt it to
the ground. From there, they went to the nearby palatial mansion of
Chief Vincent Duru and destroyed his property, his expensive cars were
wrecked and Duru himself narrowly escaped. From there, the crowd split
into attack groups and spread out to other sites of the priviledged
elite and unleashed maximum destruction. The well-known Piano Plaza and
Stores, alongside another hotel, Chibet Hotel, and various businesses
linked to the Otokoto and their associates were utterly destroyed. The
Zubairu-led government later confiscated all the property as recommended
by the panel which was headed by Justice PC Onumajuru.
GORY: Some of the Otokoto killings suspects.
From there, they rushed to the palace of the traditional ruler and
chairman of the state council of traditional rulers, Eze Onu Egwu Nwoke
(later indicted alongside Aneke and Abure by the panel of inquiry) and
burnt down his residence and his petrol station, they also destroyed the
king’s 15 airconditioners and many of his cars. They were not done yet,
from there, the crowd ‘troops’ headed for the residences of former Imo
State officials. These administrators were targeted because of what was
described as ‘their alleged unwillingness to properly tackle several cases of ritual murder, kidnapping and robbery while in office.’
The angry rioters only agreed to calm down when the military
administrator (MILAD) assured them that a full, state-level
investigation of the incident was going to be launched.
THE INVESTIGATIONS
Following the arrest of Ekeanyanwu, he was remanded in police custody
while awaiting trial. But while he was in the police custody, magic
happened as usual, he was killed by food poisoning. He killed the boy on
Thursday and by Sunday morning, the 22nd of
September, he was found dead in police custody and by Monday morning,
the news of his death was already spreading throughout Owerri.
But
luckily for the interrogators, before he was killed, Ekeanyanwu
confessed and mentioned Leonard Unaogu as the brain behind the ritual
killing syndicate. He confessed that the ritual killing ring was a
well-organized machine that specialized in the harvesting of human body
parts and sold them to those interested in using them for rituals and
all the usual nonsense they claimed to be using them for. He also said
it was Unaogu who ordered him to get a human head.
Some
reports indicate that the Otokoto saga (as the ritual killing came to
be known) had been in place as far back as 1976. Confessional statements
also show that no one was spared at the Otokoto Hotel. Innocent guests
and unsuspecting travellers who lodged at the hotel were drugged or
attacked in the middle of their sleep and hacked to death after which
they were cut into pieces for sale.
Police officers who swooped upon the hotel discovered not only the
shallow grave containing that of the little boy but also graves
containing other victims with their decomposing and dismembered corpses.
No one knows the exact number of bodies exhumed at Otokoto Hotel, with
figures varying from 8 to two dozen. Some were buried at inconspicuous
locations such as under the flowerbeds. Such evil, such horror!
The man that Ekeanyanwu mentioned before he was poisoned to death,
Leonard Unaogu, was known in the society as a business tycoon. Everyone
knew him. But that was not all. His junior brother, Laz Unaogu, was a
serving minister under the General Abacha regime. The brother of a
serving federal minister was implicated in the beheading of a poor boy,
it was a classic case of the rich against the oppressed and poor
Nigerian majority. Leonard Unaogu was eventually arrested by the police
when Duru claimed that police officers had told him that the late
Ekeanyanwu had confessed that Unaogu commissioned the killing. He was
arrested and made to face the judicial commission of inquiry and
eventually held in prison, charged with murder. It seemed the government
really wanted the culprits or at least someone punished because the
people of Owerri were ready to pounce on anyone should they be released
to go free.
But the people of Owerri made their voices heard, they pursued the case
till the very end. In fact, the Otokoto case can be seen as the case of
the Owerri people versus the Otokoto Seven (as the seven principal
suspects were called). The police arrested Unaogu and when he was
quizzed, he lied with a straight face that he never knew anyone called
Innocent Ekeanyanwu and that he was not even in Owerri when the crime
was committed, saying he was in Lagos. He would later say the same thing
in court only for the presiding judge to brush it aside as nonsense
saying his location when the offence was committed was irrelevant to the
matter at hand.
Ekeanyanwu,
who murdered the boy, was aged 32 and he worked as a gardener inside
the Otokoto Hotel. When he died of food poisoning, the Imo State Police
Commissioner released a press statement with the speed of light saying
the police knew nothing about it saying there was no foul play. This
irresponsible talk from the police chief enraged the Owerri youths, who
promptly returned to streets demanding justice for the slain boy. This
time around, they were determined more than ever to find their own
evidence of ritual murder.
They invaded the homes of ‘suspected dealers in human body parts’
sniffing around for hard evidence which they reportedly found in one of
the houses. The churches were not spared too, especially the new-breed
evangelical churches, with their main target being the Overcomers
Christian Mission along Wetheral where it was rumoured that human skulls
were discovered with charms and amulets but the police later said what
was found there were various animal skulls, pots full of vulture and
other feathers, chalk, red candles, books on mystic subjects,
photographs, cowries, objects shaped like human beings and bottles that
contained unspecified powders and herbal preparations.
Energized
by their success at this discovery, the protesters marched on other
churches, a lodge and even an ashram. All the churches popular with the
millionaires of Owerri were attacked and destroyed. Only Winners Chapel
narrowly escaped as it had been surrounded by battle-ready police
officers. By the time the storm calmed on the 27th of
September, 26 buildings and several cars had been destroyed. It was a
barbarous scene and the savagery mixed with the brutality was clearly
evident in the destruction. All the Otokoto suspects were remanded in
the Owerri federal prisons during trial.
THE TRIAL AND JUDGEMENT
At
first, nine people testified before Justice SO Ekpe, who took over from
Justice Gabriel Ojiako, the retired chief judge of Imo State, in the
course of the trial. Trial started on the 9th of
December, 1996 with Hillary Ngozi Opara as the first prosecution
witness. The court also admitted the confessional statement of Innocent
Ekeanyanwu, taken by Ambrose Nnah, a police sergeant who recorded the
statement in Igbo. He testified in court on the 17th of
June, 1998 as a witness saying the statement was recorded in English
and read to Ekeanyanwu in Igbo before he thumbprinted it. Counsel to
Duru and Unaogu (Tony Mogboh, SAN) objected saying there was nothing to
show it was interpreted to him in Igbo after it was recorded in English
and that the Igbo version should also be attached to prevent distortion.
Their objections were overruled with the judge saying:
“There
is no evidence before me that the statement was not made voluntarily.
And if a statement is made voluntarily, it is admissible in evidence.
The objections are therefore overruled. I rule that the statement is
admissible in law and should therefore be admitted as exhibit II.”
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