Three years after shooting a football fan, Kolade Johnson, to death, Olalekan Ogunyemi, a dismissed police officer, has been sentenced to life imprisonment.
Ogunyemi, who was attached to the defunct-Special Anti-Cultism Squad (SARS) of the Nigeria Police Force (NPF), made news headlines in 2019, when he shot Johnson in his lower abdomen at a viewing centre at Mangoro, Ikeja area of Lagos State.
Multiple reports at the time claimed that Johnson was watching a football match between Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur when the policeman shot him.
Telling his side of the story, Ogunyemi had stated that it was not his intention to shoot dead the father of one.
According to him, he joined his unit in conducting a raid at the viewing centre the deceased was watching the football match.
The murder convicted policeman said he only shot in the air after his team was mobbed as they attempted to arrest a suspected cultists.
His words: “We heard a distress call that we should move to Mangoro. So, on getting there, we saw a group of guys smoking Indian hemp. We thought they’re cultists and effected an arrest there.
“Suddenly, they mobbed us, me and my boys. So, in terms of escaping them, I fired up.
“I didn’t know how it got to meet the guy in question that was shot dead, I don’t know. I only fired one up.”
However, at Ogunyemi’s trial on Thursday, September 22, Lagos State prosecution counsel, Jubril Kareem called seven witnesses, who convinced the judge that the football fan was intentionally killed.
Corroborating the witnesses’ claims, a pathologist, Dr Oluwaseun Williams, testified that Johnson, 35, suffered six gunshot injuries.
