The criminals should be served full weight of the law
Increasingly, many Nigerians are now living in fear over growing cases of ritual killings. Last week, security operatives arrested a suspected serial killer who reportedly confessed to murdering dozens of people in the Odukpani Local Government Area of Cross River State. The suspect claimed he was assisted by a woman who usually lured unsuspecting victims to isolated locations where they were murdered, obviously for ritual purposes. But the Odukpani killings are not isolated incidents. While there may be no reliable statistics, the menace of missing persons and ritual killings across the country has become pronounced. Indeed, it has become so obvious that a civil society organisation, ‘Enough is Enough’, has since opened a website to document the trend.
From Lagos to Port Harcourt, Enugu and other cities across the country, hardly a week passes without tales of some people killed for what are attributed to ritual purposes. Last November, a Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) officer and her 12-year-old daughter, were gruesomely murdered in Osun State by a family friend who lured them to the shrine of a herbalist where they were slaughtered and dismembered, with their vital organs removed. And in April this year, the Kwara State Police Command apprehended a man with the skull of a deceased family member whose remains he had exhumed.
