Kausarat Muritala
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A
Lagos High Court in Ikeja on Thursday sentenced a 35-year-old police
corporal, Ikechukwu Nwabueze, to death by hanging for killing a
three-year-old girl at a checkpoint in Ketu in April 2009.
Kausarat Muritala, who died on the spot,
was hit in the head by bullet which penetrated through the back of the
car conveying her and her parents.
The shooting took place at Obanle Aro junction in Ketu.
Justice Olabisi Akinlade, in a judgment,
held that Nwabueze, intentionally killed the deceased and therefore
found him guilty of one count of murder preferred against him by the
state Directorate of Public Prosecutions.
“The only statutory punishment for
murder is death penalty. Accordingly, the sentence of the court upon you
ex-Corporal Ikechukwu Nwabueze is that you be hanged by neck until you
be dead and may the Lord have mercy on your soul,” Akinlade said.
As a trained policeman, the judge said
the convict could not claim ignorance “of the consequence of his action”
when he shot at the back seat of the vehicle conveying Kausarat, her
parents, Mr. And Mrs. Saliu Muritala, the family’s friend and the
driver.
Akinlade said, “The bullet penetrated through the back of the car. He aimed at the occupants of the vehicle.
“He cannot claim that he was not aware
of the consequence of his action. He had the intention to kill or cause
grievous bodily injuries when he fired at the back of the car.”
She said the punishment would serve as a deterrent to policemen who recklessly “cut short the lives of innocent Nigerians.”
“Only God knows what little Kausarat
would have become if her life was not cut short,” Akinlade said after
listening to defence’s allocutus (plea for mercy).
Nwabueze had said he and his colleagues
fired because the car did not stop for “stop and search” when flagged
down at the checkpoint.
His counsel, Mr. Yemi Omodele, had urged
the court to acquit him, saying the court could not rely on the
uncertainty of whose bullet actually killed the deceased since his
client was not the only one who fired his gun.
But Akinalde rejected the accused’s oral
testimony which she said was tainted with contradictions, full of
after-thought and was unable to provide any “defence or justification
for his action.”
She said the convict’s confessional
statement in which he admitted aiming his gun at the tyre of the vehicle
‘but that he did not know that the bullet would kill Kausarat’ was
consistent with Muritala’s testimony and that of the policeman’, who
investigated the case, Sgt. James Adetoye.
Muritala had told the court that he
rushed back with his dead daughter in his hand to the checkpoint, and
that the policemen, on sighting him, took to their heels.
He added that he handed the body over to his friend, caught up with the leader of the team and grabbed his cloth.
He said the other policemen, then turned back and started shooting in the air to scare him away.
According to him, at that time, his
friend had taken his daughter’s body to the hospital, and that when he
was unshaken by the policemen’s threat, they called for settlement.
He said he and his wife followed the
policemen to Alapere Police Station, where himself and his wife were
beaten by policemen until “several senior police officers” intervened.
In his allocutus, Omodele urged the
judge to temper justice with mercy and impose imprisonment instead of
death penalty, “in the light of campaigns against death sentence.”
But the Director of Public Prosecutions,
Mrs. Olabisi Ogungbesan, urged the court to give the “maximum sentence”
because “the menace of policemen releasing bullets recklessly on
innocent citizens needed to be discouraged.”
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