The Interview Editors
International news organisation, CNN has traced and talked to victims and eyewitnesses of the October 21, 2020 shooting at Lekki Toll Gate in Lagos, that followed the EndSARS protests.
The news networked also spoke to several families who searching hospitals in Lagos for the bodies of their family members who are still missing or have been confirmed by eyewitnesses to have killed in the shooting.
According to the CNN report around midnight on October 21, Elisha Sunday Ibanga answered a phone call from his older brother’s number.
“The person on the other end of the line – a stranger – broke the news that Ibanga’s brother, Victor, had been shot dead at the Lekki toll gate, in Lagos, Nigeria, where he had been peacefully protesting against police brutality earlier that night,” CNN reported.
The person told him that the police took his body away,” Ibanga, 24, told CNN. An eyewitness to Victor Sunday Ibanga’s death told CNN the 27-year-old entrepreneur was shot in the head during the protest.
Since Elisha Sunday Ibanga learned of his brother’s death, he has been visiting hospitals in a desperate search for his remains.
CNN also said it obtained and geolocated a photograph of Victor’s body lying in a pool of blood and wrapped in the white and green of the Nigerian standard – one of the same flags gripped by fellow protesters earlier in the evening as they sang the country’s national anthem. Ibanga confirmed the photograph is of his brother.
The report said evidence of bullet casings from the scene matched those normally used by the Nigerian army when shooting live rounds, according to current and former Nigerian military officials.
Verified video footage – using timestamps and data from the video files – shows soldiers who appear to be shooting in the direction of protesters.
And accounts from eyewitnesses establish that after the army withdrew, a second round of shooting happened later in the evening.
The bodies of other protesters are nowhere to be found.
Peace Okon, 24, hasn’t seen her younger brother Wisdom, 18, since he went to the protest the night of the shooting.
He just came back from work on that Tuesday, ate his food and went there,” Okon told CNN.
She started worrying when he didn’t arrive home that night. By the next morning, Okon was out searching for him. “I’ve gone to hospitals, I’ve gone to police stations, I’ve gone to everywhere. I can’t find him,” she said.
Her brother had only moved to Lagos a few weeks before the protest – Okon had helped him find a job as a cleaner at a bank. She says he didn’t know anyone at the protest and had never been to one before.
Okon said she wants the Nigerian authorities to tell her if her brother is alive and detained or dead.
The shootings at Lekki toll gate followed weeks of “#EndSARS” protests against police brutality that had burst onto the streets of cities across Nigeria.
