maxwell oditta
Snr. Correspondent, Lagos

The coroner, Chief Magistrate Ayo Odugbesan, ruled that from the totality of evidence adduced at the inquest, Mr. Joseph did not commit suicide. He did not fall by accident from the height of 19 to 20ft on to the ledge where his body was found.

The coroner’s position is contrary to that canvassed by two Senior Advocates of Nigeria, Professor Alfred Babatunde Kasunmu and Chief Felix Fagbohungbe, who represented Mr. Kemi Pinheiro, the receiver manager and the bank that appointed him a receiver over the assets and liabilities of Mobitel at the inquest.

“ I find that Mr. Charles Alaba Joseph was killed on the ledge where his body was found. I can only assume that he must have found his way back into the building and taken the elevator down to the car park and climbed down onto the ledge probably with the intention of jumping to the ground which is a shorter distance from the third floor and mixing with the crowd.

“Whoever saw and killed him pursued him from the car park onto that ledge,” Mrs. Odugbesan ruled, adding that her reasoning has no factual evidence to back it up.

“ It seems to be the only reasonable explanation of how he got onto that ledge,” she said.

Although the coroner said she is unable to recommend anyone for prosecution, she chided Pinheiro for aggressive behaviour by involving armed policemen in his bid to take over Mobitel.

She held that it was unnecessary for the receiver-manager to go to take over a company with so much firepower.

She expressed the belief that the police that accompanied Pinheiro did not need to carry an AK47 with 30 rounds of ammunition, as they were not going to quell a riot.

“ He (Pinheiro) should have known that a lot of our policemen are trigger-happy and cannot be trusted to contain a situation without resort to their guns. In this case, the matter was purely civil and no form of ammunition was necessary,” she noted.

Odugbesan relied heavily on call history made available by a GSM operating network in Nigeria, which revealed all the text messages that Joseph sent out and received on that fateful September 15.

On Joseph’s phones which the initial police investigators failed to recover, she said that evidence showed that these phones were removed from Joseph’s pockets intact, confirming further that he could not have fallen from such a height with his phones intact or his keys not falling out of his pocket. Investigations, she disclosed, further showed that these phones, which were traced to Mr. Adekoya’s possession had been removed from his office without his knowledge.

“ I found out that one of the phones had become inactive between November 19th – 24th 2005,” she added.

The coroner rubbished the evidence given by Joseph’s driver, one Lukman Kareem, who testified that his boss slipped while trying to jump down from the third floor in while purportedly trying to escape from the receiver-manager and his team.

She described Lukman’s evidence as “most unbelievable. If the police believe it, then it must have been that the police were desperate to discredit the first autopsy report.” She noted that Lukman’s “eye-witness” account was given ten days after the first post-mortem result.

The coroner posited that the police did not investigate the case in the way that an investigation should have been done. Her words:

“ They were too much in a hurry to discredit the findings in the first autopsy because they felt that a finding of a gun shot injury would put the spot light on the policemen that accompanied the Receiver-Manager to Mobitel, forgetting that the incident occurred on a weekday, ICON House and its environs housed different offices and banks and a lot of security men work around there.” The coroner summarily adopted the first autopsy report conducted by Professor John Oladapo Obafunwa, which attributed the cause of Joseph’s death to gunshot wound.