At last, justice seemed to have been served partially in the premeditated murder of six Igbo traders in Abuja in 2005, as a Federal Capital territory High Court has sentenced two former police officers to death for their involvement in the murder.
The infamous incident, tagged Apo Six elicited outrage across the country, when the traders, five men and a woman, were reportedly killed while returning from a night party in Abuja.
The presiding judge, Justice Ishaq Bello, found both Ezekiel Acheneje and Baba Emmanuel guilty of the murder and sentenced them to death.
Other suspects in the case, which had been hindered by what was called “institutional challenges ranging from series of adjournments, conveyance of defendants from the prison to court and difficulty in getting witnesses to testify, include: Danjuma Ibrahim, Nicholas Zakaria, Acheneje, Emmanuel, and Sadiq Salami while Othman Abdulsalami is still at large.
The victims, Ifeanyi Ozo, Chinedu Meniru, Isaac Ekene, Paulinus Ogbonna, Anthony Nwokike and Augustina Arebun, aged between 21 and 25, were allegedly killed in Apo, a satellite town in Abuja.
Eight policemen testified that Ibrahim, who had allegedly made love advances towards Ms Arebun, but she refused, ordered the killing of the traders.
But the defendants claimed that the five men and one woman were robbers, who had first opened fire on them and had pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Ozo and Arebun had initially survived the attack, as the others died immediately, but were taken outside Abuja where they were killed, but not before Ozo had managed to make calls to his friends.
