Lekki tollgate – At least 99 people were killed in Lagos during the #EndSARS protest and had their bodies deposited at a morgue in the state, an official has said.

The victims include three that were killed in Lekki during the shooting by soldiers at unarmed protesters on October 20, 2020, the Chief Pathologist of the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), John Obafunwa, told a Judicial Panel of Inquiry.

He said autopsies were done on the 99 dead bodies which were brought to the morgues between October 19 and 24, 2020. He, however, did not present the details of the autopsies.

Mr Obafunwa, a professor of Medicine and Head of the Department of Morbid Anatomy at the Lagos University College of Medicine, spoke on Saturday while giving evidence to assist the judicial panel in its investigation of the October 20, 2020, Lekki tollgate shooting incident.

The don told the panel that only three corpses were recorded to have been from Lekki, and 96 other bodies from different parts of Lagos.

Saturday proceedings

While giving evidence on the number of dead bodies received from Lekki on the day of the shooting incident, Mr Obafunwa said LASUTH has only three records.

He presented the pictures of three bodies from Lekki to the panel, showing different degrees of injuries.

“Those are the three bodies I was told were from Lekki as recorded by the people who brought them in,” he said.

While being cross-examined by Olumide Fusika, a counsel to some #EndSARS protesters, Mr Obafunwa disclosed that a total of 99 bodies were recorded between October 19 and 24.

“I want to prove to this panel that the claim that only three dead bodies were brought in from Lekki is not true,” Mr Fusika said, while questioning the pathologist.

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Mr Fusika, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, requested that the panel order the chief pathologist to present the records of all 99 cases recorded during the period.

“Since he was told that only those three are from Lekki, he might have been told the wrong thing,” Mr Fusika said.

Mr Obafunwa explained that the bodies were deposited by the Lagos State Environmental Health Monitoring Unit (SEHMU), an agency in charge of recovering dead bodies.

“I don’t go about scavenging for dead bodies. It is when they are brought in that we are told and it is recorded where they were taken from.”

The chief pathologist said according to their records, the bodies were recovered from different parts of Lagos including Ikorodu, Lagos Mainland, Yaba and Mushin.

Source – https://www.premiumtimesng.com/

Lekki tollgate: three bodies deposited at morgue – Pathologist
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EndSARS – Last week, the media organization published an investigation alleging that the Nigerian Army used live bullets on protesters during its intervention in the #EndSARS protest at Lekki in Lagos State.

Despite threats of sanction from the Nigerian Government over its investigative report on the shooting at Lekki Toll Gate during the #EndSARS protests, CNN has released a second report on the incident.

Last week, the media organisation published an investigation alleging that the Nigerian Army used live bullets on protesters during its intervention in the #EndSARS protest at Lekki in Lagos State.

The Nigerian Government had tagged the investigation as fake news, threatening to sanction the broadcaster for “irresponsible reporting”.

On Monday, in a letter addressed to Jonathan Hawkins, VP Communications of CNN, Lai Mohammed, Minister of Information, said the report did not just fall short of journalistic standards but reinforces the disinformation that is going around on the issue.

However, the network on Tuesday did a second report with more damning footage showing soldiers shooting at unarmed protesters on October 20, 2020.

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In its report, CNN quoted Ahmed Taiwo, Commander of 81 Division, Army Military Intelligence Brigade, as admitting that soldiers carried live ammunition to the protest ground.

The CNN report also highlighted the fact that Taiwo’s claim was at variance with the minister’s, who had claimed last week that the army fired blank bullets.

The fresh report also showed protesters running as soldiers opened fire at the toll gate.

Source – http://saharareporters.com/

EndSARS: CNN Releases Second Report On Lekki Shootings
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#EndSARS – Last Sunday, wearing a face shield, a protective mask and a waist-pouch full of hand sanitizer, I stood in front of the Nigerian high commission in London with hundreds of fellow Nigerians. We held up placards, raised our fists and chanted: “End Sars,” over and over again.

The cry had first begun in Nigeria, when a video emerged of special anti-robbery squad (Sars) police officers shooting a man on the streets of Lagos. Though the date of the video is unknown, as is the name of the victim, Nigerians are no strangers to police brutality. It has either happened to you, or to someone you know. The police are not your friends, we often joke, with our special blend of black humor.

And yet somehow, something was different this time. Musicians like Runtown and Falz tweeted about a protest. The next day, the streets were full of young people chanting “End Sars”. Almost everyone had a story about being assaulted by a Sars officer, of being extorted, sexually harassed, or wrongfully detained.

Soon, US celebrities such as P Diddy, Trey Songz and Viola Davis had picked up the hashtag and were tweeting their support. In the UK, actor John Boyega, who is of Nigerian descent, also used his social media page to support the protests. What these stars realised, before most of the western media did, was that this was another iteration of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Nigerian police officers are black, you may say. How can this be a BLM issue? Well, imagine New Zealand police officers shooting, maiming and killing unarmed white citizens because they were well dressed, because they had flashy phones, because they worked in the tech industry and therefore assumed they must be involved in fraud (all reasons used by Sars). Imagine if there were video footage of all these atrocities happening in leafy Christchurch. There would be global outrage. International sanctions. World leaders rushing to condemn these acts.

Yet the world seems curiously indifferent when the victims are black. Part of the reason African leaders get away with atrocities on African soil is because they know the world will turn a blind eye to them. Murderous despots will still be granted visas to Paris, London and New York. They will spend their loot on property and gaudy Rolexes, propping up foreign economies instead of building their own.

The Black Lives Matter movement began because the deaths of innocent African American men and women were ignored, in the same way the deaths of young Nigerians at the hands of Sars have been ignored.

Black lives matter everywhere that black lives are found: be it on the streets of the US, in rubber dinghies on the Mediterranean Sea, or in the towns and cities of Nigeria. Nigerians cried over the killing of George Floyd. And we hope in America, in Brazil, in Britain, in France, in China, in India, the African diaspora will also stand with us as we mourn the protester Jimoh Isiaq, who was shot last Saturday, and others killed by Sars.

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When one of us hurts, we all hurt. When one of us wins, we all win. This was the Pan-African dream of Marcus Garvey, of WEB Du Bois, of Constance Agatha Cummings-John, of Edward Wilmot Blyden, of Abdias do Nascimento, of Kwame Nkrumah and of many others.

Source – https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/16/black-lives-matter-everywhere-support-endsars-nigeria

#EndSARS Black lives matter everywhere the world should support the movement
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#EndSars – Nigerians have been protesting for years against police brutality, so why did this October’s protests gain international attention and support at a scale never seen before?

Over the last two weeks, an outpouring of support for Nigerian protesters has played out on Twitter, with various hashtags, but predominantly #EndSARS.

Sars stands for the Special Anti-Robbery Squad.

Accusations of Sars officers robbing, attacking and even killing people go back years but a new wave of protest started at the beginning of October.

Nigerian technology news site Tech Cabal tracks this wave down to 3 October.

A tweet by someone with just 800 followers received more than 10,000 retweets:

The Tweeter, who calls himself Chinyelugo, told the BBC that he normally keeps a low profile on Twitter but that he personally had been harassed by the police previously so when a friend told him about what appeared to be another attack by police he felt the need to tweet it.

“If Sars see you as a young person who is successful with a nice car, they will harass you and extort money from you,” he explained.

He later tweeted video of what he said was the young man shot by police.

The video appeared to be from an Instagram stories post by an account by someone who describes themselves as Azakaza Sarah – a brand ambassador.

Her posts are normally a mixture of posing in fishnet tights and promoting body scrubs.

It’s possible that this video had already passed from the person who filmed it, through many different people, and WhatsApp groups before it reached Azakaza Sarah.

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A few people who the Nigerian press described as social media influencers, and later described themselves as “accidental leaders” took up the cause.

The BBC’s Nduka Orjinmo says the real energy was injected on Wednesday 7 October, four days after the tweet about the man being shot, when Rinu Oduala, a woman who describes herself as a media strategist, persuaded other protesters to spend the night outside government house in Lagos.

Source – https://www.bbc.co.uk/

#EndSars – How Nigeria’s anti-police brutality protests went global
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