Family Seeks Justice Over Alleged Attempts By Their Son's Wife To Cover Up His Murder

Family Seeks Justice Over Alleged Attempts By Their Son's Wife To Cover Up His Murder

A grieving family simply identified as Anyalenkeya has accused Augustina Anyalenkeya, wife of their brother, Benedict Uzoma Anyalenkeya, of killing him.

Lilian, the younger sister of the deceased, who spoke with SaharaReporters, said the family raised questions regarding the death of their brother but got no answers.

A grieving family simply identified as Anyalenkeya has accused Augustina Anyalenkeya, wife of their brother, Benedict Uzoma Anyalenkeya, of killing him.

 

Lilian, the younger sister of the deceased, who spoke with SaharaReporters, said the family raised questions regarding the death of their brother but got no answers.

 

Uzoma was allegedly murdered at his residence at Legend Business Complex, Ogombo, Ajah-Lagos on December 10, 2020.

 

According to Lilian, several attempts have been made to arrest the widow but she always found a way out.

 

Lilian accused police officers of the Force Criminal Investigation Department, Abuja, of complicity in the matter.

 

She said: “Like they always say, a murder suspect should be remanded until the investigation is concluded. I don't know how she did it but the police granted her bail twice, first in Lagos.”

 

The family alleged that the wife gives conflicting accounts of incidents surrounding her husband’s death each time she gets questioned by the family.

 

Lilian said, “The story she gave us was that on the first floor which he gave to his church was where he had the end of the year customers’ forum. And that at the end of that forum around 2 pm, he went upstairs to his office, inserted his key in his door and asked his secretary to get him a file. He called the daughter who was around to get him lunch and then as he put the key on the door, he fell and died on the spot. That was what she told us.”

 

Lilian said she immediately contacted her younger brother, Mike, who works in Lagos to get to the scene and take snapshots of the incident so that the rest of the family outside Lagos could have first-hand information of what was going on.

 

She continued: “When the young man got there, he took pictures and sent about 6 pictures to us. There was a picture there which got me personally curious. It showed a side of his head having two cuts so I asked him what the red mark was, he asked the woman and she said it was when he fell that he hit his head on the tile and got those marks.

 

“I sent that picture to my doctor who told me those marks were not from a fall, that it looks like an inflicted wound, and that I should ask if he fell forward or backwards. I told my brother to ask her, she said he fell backwards. I called the doctor and told him what the wife said, he said if he truly fell backwards, the position of the marks was wrong.

 

“When I told my younger brother, he got curious. I asked him to ask her where he fell so she said he fell in his office upstairs. When they got upstairs, he said the whole of the floor and the corridor leading to the floor of his office was wet so they asked what happened, the Secretary, Monica, said she mopped the floor because of the bloodstains. The question is, what was the quantity of the blood he lost for them to have mopped an entire office? My brother wanted to ask more questions but Monica said he should not ask her questions that theirs was to do what madam asked them to do.

 

“We asked if they took my brother to the hospital after he fell, if they called any doctor. My younger brother even tried calling 'Flying Doctors' because we were not sure if he was truly dead. The helicopter came from Murtala Muhammed Airport and when it was time to touch down, they called her to give them directions that they wanted to land, she switched off her phone. It was later the crew told us that.

 

“All of us didn't know he had died 6 hours before then. My younger brother was like, let us move him to the hospital but she said, 'I said he is dead; he is dead!' but he was like how can we be so sure? She now said they had taken him to two hospitals that claimed he was brought in dead. He asked, 'What are the names of those hospitals, did they give first aid, did you collect card?' and she was like, 'stop asking stupid questions’.

 

“My younger brother said okay, our brother is gone, what do we do next now? Let us go to the mortuary and she was like she had taken him to three hospitals already and brought back the corpse to the complex so she could lay him on the altar. My brother was like, you went to three hospitals and you never called any of us. He was like, let's take him to the morgue now and by tomorrow, our elder brother will come to Lagos from the East.”

 

Lilian further stated that when the corpse was taken to the hospital, a medical doctor confirmed the death but informed the group that Uzoma had died six hours earlier.

 

This, she said, got her younger brother who was present, more curious.

 

She said the eldest son, following the advice of a mortuary attendant, asked that an autopsy be conducted on the corpse, to which Augustina bluntly refused but accepted after much persuasion.

 

She added: “He now told her that she would need to accompany her husband's body home, she refused. That took another two, three days, then they said the son would have to come, she said no, that he was still young. Later, she agreed, they made an arrangement with FAAN (Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria), did a COVID-19 test for the corpse and met the requirements. The flight was scheduled for 4:30 pm. My brother was there with another uncle waiting for the son to come from Lekki, but they called and called, she refused to pick. By 3:30 pm, she called that her son would not come again, they missed that flight.

 

“She said they would try again the following day. I said they should get an ambulance and come by road. They got to Owerri with the corpse and while the mortuary attendants were opening up my brother's body, one of them said ‘oh, they have murdered this young man. I asked him how he knew and he said it was his profession, that he knew what he was talking about.”

 

In a statement issued by the head of the family, Francis Chibuzor Anyalenkeya, the family discredited a report by Sunday Samuel, younger brother of Augustina Anyalenkeya, who claimed that the widow was not in town when her husband died in his office.  

 

The family said she was there and all efforts made by the entire family for Augustina to tell the family how her husband met his untimely death were resisted.

 

 

Chibuzor, in the statement, said the family held (a) meeting in January 2021 and Augustina was present with her two eldest children. He said immediately after the meeting, he got a call from Samuel who is based in the United States that, “Mr Ben is dead and that is it. There is nothing you can do about that except to accept that”.

 

He said the family had to conduct an autopsy on the corpse and Augustina, after giving consent, hired the services of two pathologists to represent her in the autopsy. Lilian also confirmed this to SaharaReporters.

 

“As soon as she became privy to the result of the autopsy, Mrs Augustina Kaina Anyalenkeya changed her story again. This time around, she denied engaging the services of either of her two pathologists.”

 

Lilian said the female pathologist hired by Augustina, reportedly on seeing how cruelly Uzoma was killed, called Augustina and said in tears, “Madam, you are a very wicked person. There are many ways to kill a man, this is too much. I have already done the job you paid me for."

 

The family head said the autopsy was conducted because Uzoma and Augustina's marriage was filled with violence, abuse and manipulation.

 

He said the widow, before her husband's death, was in the habit of accusing her husband of infidelity, “slapping him before his domestic staff and children, tapping and bugging his cars and phones to eavesdrop on his conversations, fighting female neighbours on the street for ‘chasing’ her husband, calling to threaten to kill and fighting his female colleagues, his imaginary girlfriends, his female employees and even church leaders”.

 

“She has stabbed him in the stomach before with a kitchen knife, telling him that was a warning and that she was going to kill him the next time simply because he came to bring her back to Nigeria after she had overstayed her visa on a visit to the USA. On that occasion, he ran out of the apartment with a cloth holding the wound in one hand and driving around town with the other hand for close to an hour to get the bleeding to stop and would not check himself into a hospital in order not to alert the police who would have arrested and deported her back to Nigeria.

 

“He drove around making calls until a Nigerian friend, whose wife was a nurse, asked him to come over to their home and she treated him there,” Chibizor said.

 

The head of the family also alleged that Augustina once paid hackers to hack her husband’s email and phones, copied out all the emails and phone numbers of all the females in his contact list and sent all those females threats that she would kill them except they left her husband for her.

 

He said Augustina was always blackmailing her late husband, arm-twisting him and manipulating him to get her outrageous demands.

 

“She kept demanding money to relocate to the US or Canada but he kept telling her that it was important they began to plan for his retirement, grow their investments for the future of their children but she would have none of that.

 

“And just when late the Benedict (Uzoma) began to resist her antics after many years of manipulations, she told him pointedly that she would murder him to secure her freedom and that nothing would happen to her after doing that.”

 

Corroborating this account, Lilian said her brother told her on the phone that his wife had been persistently referring to him in the “last two weeks as a dead man; a decaying corpse, piece of rotten meat” and would then ask him to bet her that he would not live to see 25th December, 2020, then she would break into a delirious laughter.

 

Lilian said Uzoma told her he was feeling very unsafe at home, and that his life was in danger because his wife was closing in on him.

 

She said her late brother also told her that he had recently discovered that the CCTV cameras he installed at home and his business complex had been cut from their bases and that each time he paid and sent the company to come and fix them back, the wife would tell her relatives living with them to chase them away and deny them access to the premises.

 

Uzoma had agreed to visit his hometown in Owerri so the family could have a discussion but postponed the meeting to Friday, December 11, 2020 as he was to host his company’s End of Year Party on Thursday, December 10, the same day he was murdered.

 

 

Sharing details of the autopsy result, Chibuzor said Uzoma was murdered and a rusty surgical blade was left in his body by the murderers whom he described as ‘professionals'.

 

He said Uzoma's chest was stabbed, his stomach swollen with blood clots, intestines and vital organs perforated and cut, and a 24A rusted surgical blade left inside his body. His mouth was filled with dried blood, his knuckles and knees had bruises on them, evidence that he struggled for his life and one of his feet was also stabbed. The point of entry on his chest was sutured and body paint used to cover it to prevent unprofessional eyes from noticing the cut on the chest. Also, the clothes Mr Ben wore at the time of his murder were removed and they wore new clothes for him before calling his siblings’.

 

 

The family said since the autopsy report came out, each of his surviving siblings had been threatened on the phone by unknown persons calling with numbers, and followed by strange men and cars around their homes and offices.

 

They claim they feel unsafe in their homes, adding that if any harm comes to them, Augustina should be held responsible.

According to Lilian, Augustina threatened the family members “for daring her”.

 

Lilian said, “Before the autopsy report came out, we were not receiving such calls, there were no strange faces around our homes and offices. At the police station in Ogombo, Lagos, she was threatening us in the presence of the police, that she would kill the rest of us for daring her. You can imagine how we are living now. We are being careful.”

 

She said Augustina had been blackmailing the family by giving false information to friends of the deceased that the family was trying to claim Uzoma’s property.

 

“We even learnt that she sought financial assistance from several friends and colleagues of her late husband after lying to them that the family took her to court in Abuja on the 24th of February, 2021 to take her late husband’s properties from her. When we heard that, we were shocked.

 

“This is someone I have been trying to reach out to so we can pay her son's school fees but she refused to answer our calls. We are concerned about our brother's children,” she said.

 

 

The family called on the Inspector General of Police, the Human Rights Community, to help them in their quest for justice. They warned that should the case be swept under the carpet, many more young people will fall under the profile of ‘slumping and dying', even when they were murdered.

 

 

They added: “We also wish to appeal to the general public, friends and colleagues of the late Mr Benedict Uzoma Anyalenkeya and all men and women of goodwill to prevail on the Nigeria Police to do the right thing and not fall for the intense pressure being mounted by Mrs Augustina Kiene Anyalenkeya, her cohorts and enablers as well as her retinue of lawyers to cover up this gruesome murder. If this case is swept under the carpet, many more Nigerians, especially youths with rising profiles who are contributing to the building of our nation will continue to be murdered and the dummy of “slumping and dying” sold to their families and unsuspecting public. Today, it is Ben, tomorrow; it could be anyone’s son, brother, or father.”

Uzoma was allegedly murdered at his residence at Legend Business Complex, Ogombo, Ajah-Lagos on December 10, 2020.

 

According to Lilian, several attempts have been made to arrest the widow but she always found a way out.

 

Lilian accused police officers of the Force Criminal Investigation Department, Abuja, of complicity in the matter.

 

She said: “Like they always say, a murder suspect should be remanded until the investigation is concluded. I don't know how she did it but the police granted her bail twice, first in Lagos.”

 

The family alleged that the wife gives conflicting accounts of incidents surrounding her husband’s death each time she gets questioned by the family.

 

Lilian said, “The story she gave us was that on the first floor which he gave to his church was where he had the end of the year customers’ forum. And that at the end of that forum around 2 pm, he went upstairs to his office, inserted his key in his door and asked his secretary to get him a file. He called the daughter who was around to get him lunch and then as he put the key on the door, he fell and died on the spot. That was what she told us.”

 

Lilian said she immediately contacted her younger brother, Mike, who works in Lagos to get to the scene and take snapshots of the incident so that the rest of the family outside Lagos could have first-hand information of what was going on.

 

She continued: “When the young man got there, he took pictures and sent about 6 pictures to us. There was a picture there which got me personally curious. It showed a side of his head having two cuts so I asked him what the red mark was, he asked the woman and she said it was when he fell that he hit his head on the tile and got those marks.

 

“I sent that picture to my doctor who told me those marks were not from a fall, that it looks like an inflicted wound, and that I should ask if he fell forward or backwards. I told my brother to ask her, she said he fell backwards. I called the doctor and told him what the wife said, he said if he truly fell backwards, the position of the marks was wrong.

 

“When I told my younger brother, he got curious. I asked him to ask her where he fell so she said he fell in his office upstairs. When they got upstairs, he said the whole of the floor and the corridor leading to the floor of his office was wet so they asked what happened, the Secretary, Monica, said she mopped the floor because of the bloodstains. The question is, what was the quantity of the blood he lost for them to have mopped an entire office? My brother wanted to ask more questions but Monica said he should not ask her questions that theirs was to do what madam asked them to do.

 

“We asked if they took my brother to the hospital after he fell, if they called any doctor. My younger brother even tried calling 'Flying Doctors' because we were not sure if he was truly dead. The helicopter came from Murtala Muhammed Airport and when it was time to touch down, they called her to give them directions that they wanted to land, she switched off her phone. It was later the crew told us that.

 

“All of us didn't know he had died 6 hours before then. My younger brother was like, let us move him to the hospital but she said, 'I said he is dead; he is dead!' but he was like how can we be so sure? She now said they had taken him to two hospitals that claimed he was brought in dead. He asked, 'What are the names of those hospitals, did they give first aid, did you collect card?' and she was like, 'stop asking stupid questions’.

 

“My younger brother said okay, our brother is gone, what do we do next now? Let us go to the mortuary and she was like she had taken him to three hospitals already and brought back the corpse to the complex so she could lay him on the altar. My brother was like, you went to three hospitals and you never called any of us. He was like, let's take him to the morgue now and by tomorrow, our elder brother will come to Lagos from the East.”

 

Lilian further stated that when the corpse was taken to the hospital, a medical doctor confirmed the death but informed the group that Uzoma had died six hours earlier.

 

This, she said, got her younger brother who was present, more curious.

 

She said the eldest son, following the advice of a mortuary attendant, asked that an autopsy be conducted on the corpse, to which Augustina bluntly refused but accepted after much persuasion.

 

She added: “He now told her that she would need to accompany her husband's body home, she refused. That took another two, three days, then they said the son would have to come, she said no, that he was still young. Later, she agreed, they made an arrangement with FAAN (Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria), did a COVID-19 test for the corpse and met the requirements. The flight was scheduled for 4:30 pm. My brother was there with another uncle waiting for the son to come from Lekki, but they called and called, she refused to pick. By 3:30 pm, she called that her son would not come again, they missed that flight.

 

“She said they would try again the following day. I said they should get an ambulance and come by road. They got to Owerri with the corpse and while the mortuary attendants were opening up my brother's body, one of them said ‘oh, they have murdered this young man. I asked him how he knew and he said it was his profession, that he knew what he was talking about.”

 

In a statement issued by the head of the family, Francis Chibuzor Anyalenkeya, the family discredited a report by Sunday Samuel, younger brother of Augustina Anyalenkeya, who claimed that the widow was not in town when her husband died in his office. 

 

The family said she was there and all efforts made by the entire family for Augustina to tell the family how her husband met his untimely death were resisted.

 

 

Chibuzor, in the statement, said the family held (a) meeting in January 2021 and Augustina was present with her two eldest children. He said immediately after the meeting, he got a call from Samuel who is based in the United States that, “Mr Ben is dead and that is it. There is nothing you can do about that except to accept that”.

 

He said the family had to conduct an autopsy on the corpse and Augustina, after giving consent, hired the services of two pathologists to represent her in the autopsy. Lilian also confirmed this to SaharaReporters.

 

“As soon as she became privy to the result of the autopsy, Mrs Augustina Kaina Anyalenkeya changed her story again. This time around, she denied engaging the services of either of her two pathologists.”

 

Lilian said the female pathologist hired by Augustina, reportedly on seeing how cruelly Uzoma was killed, called Augustina and said in tears, “Madam, you are a very wicked person. There are many ways to kill a man, this is too much. I have already done the job you paid me for."

 

The family head said the autopsy was conducted because Uzoma and Augustina's marriage was filled with violence, abuse and manipulation.

 

He said the widow, before her husband's death, was in the habit of accusing her husband of infidelity, “slapping him before his domestic staff and children, tapping and bugging his cars and phones to eavesdrop on his conversations, fighting female neighbours on the street for ‘chasing’ her husband, calling to threaten to kill and fighting his female colleagues, his imaginary girlfriends, his female employees and even church leaders”.

 

“She has stabbed him in the stomach before with a kitchen knife, telling him that was a warning and that she was going to kill him the next time simply because he came to bring her back to Nigeria after she had overstayed her visa on a visit to the USA. On that occasion, he ran out of the apartment with a cloth holding the wound in one hand and driving around town with the other hand for close to an hour to get the bleeding to stop and would not check himself into a hospital in order not to alert the police who would have arrested and deported her back to Nigeria.

 

“He drove around making calls until a Nigerian friend, whose wife was a nurse, asked him to come over to their home and she treated him there,” Chibizor said.

 

The head of the family also alleged that Augustina once paid hackers to hack her husband’s email and phones, copied out all the emails and phone numbers of all the females in his contact list and sent all those females threats that she would kill them except they left her husband for her.

 

He said Augustina was always blackmailing her late husband, arm-twisting him and manipulating him to get her outrageous demands.

 

“She kept demanding money to relocate to the US or Canada but he kept telling her that it was important they began to plan for his retirement, grow their investments for the future of their children but she would have none of that.

 

“And just when late the Benedict (Uzoma) began to resist her antics after many years of manipulations, she told him pointedly that she would murder him to secure her freedom and that nothing would happen to her after doing that.”

 

Corroborating this account, Lilian said her brother told her on the phone that his wife had been persistently referring to him in the “last two weeks as a dead man; a decaying corpse, piece of rotten meat” and would then ask him to bet her that he would not live to see 25th December, 2020, then she would break into a delirious laughter.

 

Lilian said Uzoma told her he was feeling very unsafe at home, and that his life was in danger because his wife was closing in on him.

 

She said her late brother also told her that he had recently discovered that the CCTV cameras he installed at home and his business complex had been cut from their bases and that each time he paid and sent the company to come and fix them back, the wife would tell her relatives living with them to chase them away and deny them access to the premises.

 

Uzoma had agreed to visit his hometown in Owerri so the family could have a discussion but postponed the meeting to Friday, December 11, 2020 as he was to host his company’s End of Year Party on Thursday, December 10, the same day he was murdered.

 

 

Sharing details of the autopsy result, Chibuzor said Uzoma was murdered and a rusty surgical blade was left in his body by the murderers whom he described as ‘professionals'.

 

He said Uzoma's chest was stabbed, his stomach swollen with blood clots, intestines and vital organs perforated and cut, and a 24A rusted surgical blade left inside his body. His mouth was filled with dried blood, his knuckles and knees had bruises on them, evidence that he struggled for his life and one of his feet was also stabbed. The point of entry on his chest was sutured and body paint used to cover it to prevent unprofessional eyes from noticing the cut on the chest. Also, the clothes Mr Ben wore at the time of his murder were removed and they wore new clothes for him before calling his siblings’.

 

 

The family said since the autopsy report came out, each of his surviving siblings had been threatened on the phone by unknown persons calling with numbers, and followed by strange men and cars around their homes and offices.

 

They claim they feel unsafe in their homes, adding that if any harm comes to them, Augustina should be held responsible.

According to Lilian, Augustina threatened the family members “for daring her”.

 

Lilian said, “Before the autopsy report came out, we were not receiving such calls, there were no strange faces around our homes and offices. At the police station in Ogombo, Lagos, she was threatening us in the presence of the police, that she would kill the rest of us for daring her. You can imagine how we are living now. We are being careful.”

 

She said Augustina had been blackmailing the family by giving false information to friends of the deceased that the family was trying to claim Uzoma’s property.

 

“We even learnt that she sought financial assistance from several friends and colleagues of her late husband after lying to them that the family took her to court in Abuja on the 24th of February, 2021 to take her late husband’s properties from her. When we heard that, we were shocked.

 

“This is someone I have been trying to reach out to so we can pay her son's school fees but she refused to answer our calls. We are concerned about our brother's children,” she said.

 

 

The family called on the Inspector General of Police, the Human Rights Community, to help them in their quest for justice. They warned that should the case be swept under the carpet, many more young people will fall under the profile of ‘slumping and dying', even when they were murdered.

 

 

They added: “We also wish to appeal to the general public, friends and colleagues of the late Mr Benedict Uzoma Anyalenkeya and all men and women of goodwill to prevail on the Nigeria Police to do the right thing and not fall for the intense pressure being mounted by Mrs Augustina Kiene Anyalenkeya, her cohorts and enablers as well as her retinue of lawyers to cover up this gruesome murder. If this case is swept under the carpet, many more Nigerians, especially youths with rising profiles who are contributing to the building of our nation will continue to be murdered and the dummy of “slumping and dying” sold to their families and unsuspecting public. Today, it is Ben, tomorrow; it could be anyone’s son, brother, or father.”

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