Date Published: 09/24/09
23 rd September 2009. Press Release.
LAGOS AC CONDEMNS KILLING OF MR. BAYO OHU.
The Lagos State chapter of the Action congress has described as bestial and cowardly the brutal assassination of the Assistant News Editor of the Guardian Newspapers, Mr. Bayo Ohu in his Lagos residence by yet unidentified assassins. The party says that Nigeria is gradually becoming a killing field for journalists who simply do their duties and calls for full investigation into their gruesome murder.
In a release in Lagos, signed by the Publicity Secretary of the AC, Joe Igbokwe, Lagos AC says that it is alarmed at the rate journalists are being killed in circumstances that suggest they are targeted for doing their job. The party urged all relevant agencies to ensure that the killers of Mr. Ohu are unmasked and appropriately dealt with.
“Coming just some months after the killing of Mr. Abayomi Ogundeji and some few years after the brutal assassination of Mr. Godwin Agbroko, we are being led to believe that Nigeria is being made a perilous enclave for journalists and those doing their honest duties for their fatherland. We are astonished that journalist are being targeted for elimination in a country that is supposedly practicing democracy and this speaks of the queer democracy we have in place in Nigeria today.
“We are worried that journalists are now being targeted for doing their jobs in Nigeria. In this situation, we are afraid that truth is the greatest casualty as the country passé through very terrible times. We are afraid that what happened to Mr. Ohu further diminishes us all and is capable of stilling the voice of objectivity in the country’s media.
“We are sure that the brutal killing of Mr. Ohu was the cowardly reaction of a bestial class of renegades who will do everything to quell objectivity in the Nigerian media and we believe they will fail in this dastardly mission. We see the killing as cowardly and the acts of people that want to instill fear on the Nigerian media. We therefore urge the entire media to see this as a challenge it must collectively tackle in the days to come.
“We commiserate with the entire Guardian Newspapers and indeed, the family of the slain Mr. Ohu and urge them to bear the great and irreparable loss with fortitude. We call on the police, the SSS and the relevant security agencies to ensure that this murder is not allowed to follow the paths of similar callous killings in the past, which have been shoveled under the carpet. We call that no stone be left unturned to unmask the murders and bring them to justice.”
Joe Igbokwe.
Publicity Secretary,
Lagos AC.
