Some youths on Saturday stormed the Oja Odan Police Station, Yewa North Local Government Area of Ogun State and set two suspects found with a human head ablaze.
Idowu Afolabi and Johnson Adebiyi, the suspects, were caught in Oja Odan with a fresh human head.
The Ogun State Commissioner of Police, Lanre Bankole, has ordered the arrest of youths who set the suspects ablaze.
Reacting on Sunday, the state police command said there will be no room for jungle justice in the state, warning the general public that “such barbaric and unlawful action will no longer be tolerated.”
The Police Public Relations Officer, Abimbola Oyeyemi, in a statement on Sunday, confirmed that the two suspected ritualists were arrested and brought to the Oja Odan division by some vigilant and law-abiding members of the public, with allegations that a fresh human head concealed in a sack was seen with them.
He said, “While the suspects were being interrogated in the station, some unscrupulous elements went and mobilized a large number of people who invaded the station aggressively, overwhelmed the police personnel on duty and subsequently hijacked the suspects, beat them to death and set their corpses ablaze.”
Sounding a note of warning, Oyeyemi told those in the habit of taking laws into their hands to desist from such “uncivilized behaviour” as the command will henceforth “deal with whoever carries out such actions in the most decisive manner.”
The PPRO maintained that “a suspect remains a suspect until he/she is convicted by a court of competent jurisdiction, no matter how grievous the crime he suspected to have committed might be.”
He explained that “It is only the court that has the power to impose punishment on anyone found guilty of a crime, not an individual or group of people.”
Therefore, the Commissioner of Police, Lanre Bankole, Oyeyemi “has ordered a full-scale investigation into the incident with the view to bringing to justice those who participated in carrying out the barbaric and unlawful killing of the suspects.”
The CP also appealed to members of the public to have confidence in the nation’s criminal justice system and desist from self-help, saying such is alien to the law of the land.
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