Bolade Nojimu Idera and Omotayo Idera were eating and having drinks in the Kolawole area of Epe, Lagos State, on July 1. The brothers were at an event in the company of their friends, but death was lurking.

Omotayo lived to tell the story, and in narrating it to FIJ, he said he discovered his 26-year-old younger brother “was becoming weak and falling off his chair”.

He did not think too much of it at the time, and in his narration, he said, “I thought he was edgy because of sounds of gunshots into the air, so I told him to sit well and relax his back, but as I assisted him to sit properly, I noticed blood gushing out of his chest from the right side.”

It was at this moment Omotayo realised his brother was dying and his killers were getting away. A bullet from one of the gunshots security personnel were firing in the air had penetrated Bolade’s chest.

Operatives of the Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC), a traditional security outfit in Nigeria’s southwest, were responsible for the gunshots, Omotayo told FIJ.

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“There was this OPC member, Kareem Hammed, who walked past us moments before the shooting,” he said. “Immediately he passed us, what we heard was a gunshot.

Kareem Hammed

“How he was able to shoot backwards to kill my brother still baffles me. This was a really close range shot.”

He said he was able to get help from people to take Bolade to the Epe General Hospital where doctors battled through the night to save his life. Bolade was pronounced dead at about 2 am on July 2.

Omotayo said he had been making efforts to get the police to investigate but they had been treating the matter as a cult clash.

On Friday, FIJ called Godwin Okoruwa, DPO of Epe Police Division. He said he was aware of the matter and one OPC member had been arrested, but because the division did not have the resources to investigate a murder, the matter had been transferred to the State Criminal Investigations Department (SCID).
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