The Benue state Police have arrested the alleged killer of Erekaa Dooshima Naomi, a 300-level Mass Communication student of Benue State University (BSU) whose corpse was recovered from a shallow grave last week.
Police spokesperson, SP Catherine Anene, confirmed to our correspondent on Wednesday, that the suspect is in police custody.
The deceased undergraduate was reportedly missing for three days before her lifeless body was discovered in a shallow grave in a vicinity opposite the varsity.
Witnesses had alleged that the late student’s phone, ID card, and blood-stained clothes were first recovered on Tuesday around the area where the body was later found in a shallow grave the next day outside the institution’s campus opposite the College of Health Sciences.
However, the deceased’s suspected killer, one Shagbaor Ugosor Japhet, was nabbed by the police at his hideout in the Makurdi metropolis, barely a week after.
It was learnt that the suspect, Japhet killed his victim just so he would not pay back N150,000, which the late student handed over to him as house rent.
The 25-year-old suspect who is also a final year student of the same BSU allegedly received the sum of N150,000 as an agent from the deceased being payment for an apartment he rented out to her.
Japhet in the long run neither made the house available to the deceased nor returned the money to her as he was said to have confessed to using the money to gamble online.
It was gathered that he later asked the unsuspecting deceased to meet with him at the apartment and that on her arrival, he descended on her with a machete, inflicted her with several cuts on the head and killed her in the process.
He, thereafter, soaked her clothes and iPhone with her blood, then dumped the items down the street, perhaps, to change the narrative that she may have been a victim of ritual killing.
The police, however, caught up with the suspect during an investigation which identified the POS machine the deceased used to make transfer to him coupled with the testimonies of the late student’s friends who were aware of the said transaction between the duo.
