Supreme Court acquits Otokoto convict 22 years after

The Supreme Court yesterday discharged and acquitted Alban Ajaegbu, one of the accused in the celebrated case of the ritual killing of 11-year-old Ikechukuwu Okoronkwo in 1996 in Owerri, Imo State.

A unanimous judgment by a five-member panel of justices held that the circumstantial evidence relied on to convict and sentence Ajaegbu to death was not sufficient.

In her lead judgment, Justice Kudirat Kekere-Ekun ruled that the prosecution could not establish the case beyond reasonable doubt, adding that the decisions of the lower courts were based on speculation.

She said the assumption of the lower courts that because Ajaegbu worked in the hotel for 17 years, he should have known the owner of the farm near the hotel where Okoronkwo’s body was buried, was wrong.

The court therefore set aside the 2012 judgment of the Court of Appeal in Owerri, which affirmed the death sentence of the trial court. Ajaegbu was in 1997 convicted by an Owerri High Court of murder alongside the Managing Director of Otokoto Hotel in Owerri, Imo State, Vincent Duru, Samson Nnamito, Leonard Unogu and three others.

The defendants, who have been held in Port Harcourt prisons for 22 years, were indicted in the murder by Innocent Ekeanyanwu, who later died in police custody after he was arrested at a police checkpoint on a tip-off with the head of the boy.

The boy, who was hawking groundnuts, was on September 19, 1996 lured into Otokoto Hotel in Owerri where he was drugged and killed. His body was decapitated and buried in a shallow grave at a farm near the hotel.

Ekeanyanwu confessed to the murder and claimed his uncle, Leonard Unogu, requested for the head, adding that it was to the knowledge of the hotel owner, Vincent Duru.

The Supreme Court presided by Justice Tanko Muhammad had on December 9, 2017 dismissed Duru’s appeal against his conviction and death sentence.