- After bloggers mistakenly identified him as culprit
Henry Okonkwo
In a terrible case of mistaken identity, Mr Lawal Abiodun, has had his troubles doubled and compounded by the egregious error committed by careless bloggers, who wrongly identified him as the culprit accused of raping his daughter.
The seven-year-old girl, Adebisi, was raped severally resulting in her bladder being damaged by the ordeal she suffered in the hands of the paedophile, who is her neighbour.
While Abiodun was dealing with the rude shock, trauma and agony of his little daughter being defiled and her bladder damaged in the process, Abiodun got hit with a sledgehammer by his employers, who summarily dismissed him after the online story in which he was mistakenly identified in a picture as the suspected culprit was published on the internet and it went viral as other sites re-published the story.
The road that led to the present predicament of Abiodun began in the Ilupeju-Palm Grove area of Lagos when the defilement of the daughter was exposed late March, after a teacher noticed that little Adebisi, a primary 5 pupil, frequently urinated on herself while writing an examination in the school. The teacher drew the attention of the school management, which suspected sexual abuse and then alerted the Child Protection Network (CPN).
As Sunday Sun learnt, when the teachers noticed that Adebisi had urinated on herself the first time during class examination, it was taken that the little girl was gripped by exam hall anxiety. So they tried to calm her and then urged her to continue her exams. But a few minutes later, Adebisi urinated on herself again. It was at that point they smelt foul play and moved to summon Adebisi’s mother, Mrs Abiodun.
The sight of her little daughter drenched in urine made Mrs Abiodun cry, when she arrived the school. “Immediately I saw my daughter I knew something was terribly wrong with her. The headmaster together with the CPN team inquired if she had been bedwetting before then. I told them it was long she stopped and that I found it very unusual for my daughter to be urinating on herself. That made them to suspect that sexual abuse. After much interrogation, my daughter confessed that it was Baba Michael, our neighbour, who defiled her. Baba Michael just moved into our compound two months ago. He lives with his uncle and four month-old baby,” the mother said.
She said further: “I was shocked that this could happen to us. We trusted our neighbours and my husband always encouraged our children to be respectful and run errands for people older than them. Even my daughter usually takes care of their little baby and always runs different errands for Baba Micheal. I never suspected something like that was happening right under my nose.
“Baba Micheal usually refers all the young girls in the compound as his wives but we didn’t suspect anything. We didn’t know this was what he was doing to the girls.”
Following the revelation, a report was made to the police at Ilupeju Police Station and the alleged culprit, Baba Michael, a 40-year-old carpenter was immediately arrested by the police. After preliminary investigation, he was arraigned in court, and then reprimanded in prison custody. The case was adjourned till May 2, for further hearing.
Somehow news of the defilement spread within the neighbourhood and was picked up newsmen who swooped on it. Unfortunately in reporting the story and captioning the picture which Abiodun took with the daughter, some of the newspapers (The Sun excluded) wrongly identified him as the alleged culprit, when in fact he is a collateral victim, given that Adebisi is his beloved daughter. Sadly the error of the mis-captioned photograph unleashed another round of woe for Abiodun as the picture was circulated on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other online blogs, prompting angry reactions from Nigerians and online trolls, who rained curses and abuses on the innocent man.
Sunday Sun learnt that Abiodun, a truck driver for a company located in Igando area of Lagos was not aware that he had been “digitally killed and buried” on the internet, until a barrage of calls from family and friends all over the country stated to pour into his phone. While he was still trying to understand what was going on, his employer called and said that he had been dismissed.
Recounting that moment, Abiodun said: “I became afraid when I heard that my face had been posted online and mistakenly tagged a rapist. I was getting too many calls from different people. Then I got a call from the office that I had been sacked. My boss told me all that he had read that I raped a little girl, who I been calling my wife. I tried to explain that there was a mix-up, but he simply told me that I should not even bother coming to the office. I was so scared of coming outside because I didn’t know what else awaited me.”
Mrs. Aderonke Oyelakin of Pastor Bimbo Odukoya Foundation, who has been at the forefront to rehabilitate Adebisi is so appalled by “the grievous mistake committed by the bloggers, whose indefensible error has practically destroyed Abiodun’s life and put him through unimaginable double trauma.”
She added: “Learning about the his daughter’s defilement by their neighbour, plus losing his job barely a week later has left Abiodun and his family badly shaken and devastated. It is indeed saddening to see the depth of the agony he is going through. That is why we’re appealing to all and especially to the employers to reinstate him because he is a victim of mistaken identity.”
On the present situation of Adebisi, she disclosed that the little girl was currently undergoing physical, psychological and emotional treatment, noting that she had already gone through rehabilitation and received care and post trauma therapy. She added that the girl was released to her parents, and she has resumed schooling, though she would continue the prescribed therapy from home, to ensure her full re-integration back to the society and build up her self-esteem.