Lagos State Government denying 103 corpses as EndSARS protesters allegedly slain by soldiers and policemen at the Lekki Tollgate has sparked outrage.
On Sunday, a leaked memo addressed to the Lagos State Ministry of Health indicating that the State Government approved N61,285,000 for the mass burial of 103 persons identified as 2020 EndSARS victims went viral on social media and sparked outrage.
The Lagos State Government, however, responded to the leaked memo and maintained that the victims to be buried are not from the controversial Lekki Tollgate shooting.
Also read: After three years, EndSARS still stokes Controversy
Reacting, Senator Shehu Sani, the ex-Kaduna State lawmaker, said that the killing of the 103 EndSARS protesters in Lagos is one of the ‘’hidden atrocities” of the Buhari administration.
Sani stated this on Twitter this morning hours after a memo from the state government approving N61 million for mass burial of 103 persons killed during the October 20, 2020 EndSARS crisis, surfaced online.
Sani in his post referenced the killing of Shiite members in Kaduna state in 2015 and stressed that ‘‘the spirit of the victims murdered in Kaduna and Lagos will haunt Nigeria for a long time until justice is done.”
His post reads ‘‘In 2015, over a thousand members of the Islamic Movement were massacred in Zaria on the orders of the then military COAS and publicly supported by the then Governor of Kaduna State. The general public were encouraged through hateful propaganda to march and dance on the corpses of the victims and search for anything valuable in their pockets.
The bullet riddled and charred remains of the victims including women and children were reportedly buried in mass graves in Kaduna state. Their offence was simply that they ‘blocked the road against the Army chief.
The killing of the 103 EndSARS protesters in Lagos is one of the hidden atrocities of the Buhari era. The spirits of those murdered whether for ‘blocking’ the road in Zaria or ‘blocking’ the Lekki gate will continue to haunt this country and hang over its skies until justice is done.”
Also, Adeshina Ogunlana, the lead counsel to EndSARS petitioners, has faulted the position of the Lagos state government in the leaked memo approving the mass burial of 103 EndSARS victims.
Reacting to the development on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily on Monday, Ogunlana said the Lagos State Government is being clever by half.
“Government is being clever by half and they are not telling the absolute truth. Yes, I agree with the position that the 103 bodies were said, not all of them were picked up from Lekki toll gate and its environs.
“To use the word the pathologist used at the panel, that is professor Obafunwa, he said bodies were scavenged, and corpses were picked from different places. But around the area of Lekki Toll Gate, they were corpses too, some of them were dumped at the General Hospital, Lagos Island and all that.
He further condemned the government for saying that there were no named citizens from the Lekki Toll Gate, arguing that the 103 about to be buried by the government have no names as well.
“For the government now to be saying oh no there is no named citizen, the question I want to ask them is this, even the 103 corpses that they want to dispose of, do they have any names? There was no name.
“The bodies that were taken around the environment of Lekki toll gate when Baba Fafunwa was speaking, he at least identified three that were perforated with missiles,” he said.
The legal practitioner, however, corrected the impression from some quarters that all 103 bodies were from the Lekki Toll Gate, saying that is also not correct.
“People saying that the 103 is proof that actually 103 people were killed at the Lekki toll gate is a very grave error and I will not join anybody saying that.
“But to say that there was no body recovered in the environs of the Lekki toll gate incident of 2020 is completely wrong,” he said.
Ogunlana asserted that government was attempting to “profit from the cruel loss of lives” by approving as much as over N60 million for the mass burial.
“Even now the system of government that we have in Lagos State and by extension Nigeria is showing that they want to profit by cruel loss of lives.
“How could you say that you have approved N61 million to bury 103 degraded bodies in a mass grave? People that are unidentified, people that nobody came up to claim and all that, I mean that is horrendous,” Ogunlana lamented.
There has been controversy over the number of deaths recorded during the EndSARS protest, resulting in the governor setting up an inquest headed by retired Justice Doris Okuwobi.
Since the protest in 2020, both the Lagos Government and the Federal Government have consistently denied any mass killing during the EndSARS protests.
Thousands of Nigerians across the country took to the streets to protest police brutality and called for far-reaching reforms, particularly with regard to the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) of the police.
The weeks-long protests, which gained international attention, culminated in the controversial shooting of protesters at the popular Lekki Tollgate in Lagos, one of the rallying points for those who partook in the demonstrations.
