By Uche Aguoru
I was left with no option but to believe the police over the early morning church massacre which left 13 people dead and 27 down with various degrees of injuries, until the recent appearance of the man in the eye of the storm, chief Aloysius Ikegwuonu (aka Bishop), whom the police had told us, is a notorious drug dealer whose complicated drug business had led to the unfortunate incident going by police account.
Even the parish priest’s account of the incident of the 6th of August 2017 at St. Phillip’s Catholic Church, Ofufe-Amakwa Ozubulu, when the federal government delegation led by labour and productivity minister Dr. Chris Ngige visited the community did not change my mind from the police position, as his account did not provide me with a direct linkage to such unmitigated disaster.
The priest who before the deputy Governor and federal government delegation, while giving account of the massacre asserted that the gunman blindly sprayed bullets left to right as he walked along the isle, and dispelled the account that the murderer used torchlight in search of faces. He said those that survived were the ones that ran out of the church and others whose survival instinct moved to lie flat on the floor. “He finished the first magazine, loaded another and finished it,” the Rev. Fr. Said
The priest’s account offered a very sharp deviation from the Anambra state police Commissioner’s position whose investigations were concluded within hours after the sad and unprecedented incident in this part of the country, though his position corroborated various social media accounts, written and audio, on how a drug war between two Ozubulu indigenes and another online account also narrated how a drug war between Bishop and an Mbaise friend of his, led to the Ozubulu black Sunday.
H.R.H Igwe Oruche, the Traditional ruler of Ozubulu in Ekwusigo LGA, recollected that the catastrophe in his town began roughly 10 years ago when Ozubulu Development Union, ODU, which has a branch in South Africa, wanted to elect a new president-general there, and the crisis led them into coming back home for settlement until they had to go to the church to take a Christian oath of peace which also broke down shortly after, according to the royal father the crisis had persisted and has led to a couple of Ozubulu indigenes losing their lives both at home and in diaspora.
While the IPOB and its members had believed that it was the Abubakar Shekau’s Boko Haram that came to attack the Catholic Church in Ozubulu pointing at style of operation as evidence.
But seeing the same Aloysius Ikegwuonu (Bishop) moving about freely and visiting the victims in their hospital beds, dashing them money in full police protection after we had been meant to believe that the police is after him and have released the INTERPOL on him, I began to feel more uncomfortable with the police side of the story which I had swallowed without thinking it over. The surfacing of the man, the police claimed to have declared wanted under full police protection, raised so many questions within my mind.
What really happened in Ozubulu? What are the police trying to protect? Why has Bishop not taken legal action against the police for character assassination if indeed he is not guilty, and if he is guilty as alleged by the police, why has he not been arrested? Did the police truly arrest anybody in connection with the massacre as claimed, if yes, what are their confessions.
I know that within the next few weeks we all will forget it happened in our usual docile nature and the living will move on with their lives while the dead will be buried.
But one thing that I am convinced within my spirit is that, there is more to the Ozubulu massacre than the police are willing to let us know.
Aguoru
Writes from Umuahia
