Young Girl Raped and Murdered in Ogun State

The murder of a 20-year-old girl, Joan Egemba, who was allegedly stabbed and strangled to death after being raped by some unknown men in the Ijebu Igbo area of Ogun State, has thrown her family into mourning and great sorrow.. The young lady had enrolled for the 2016 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination conducted by the Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board (JAMB), after she bagged a National Diploma in Accountancy from the Federal Polytechnic, Ilaro, in the state, but was abducted on March 3, 2016, after she left her family home in the Odo Eran, Sango-Ota, for the National Open University of Nigeria centre in Awa Ijebu, where she was posted to sit for the exam the following day. According to the family, Joan was reportedly kidnapped at the Ijebu Oru Junction, some few meters from the centre, by persons suspected to be rapists or ritual murderers, with her corpse found in a bush at the back of a secondary school in Ijebu Igbo with cuts in her thighs few days later. The underwear the girl wore were said to be torn and deposits of dried semen found around her private parts, giving credence to the fact that she must have been raped before she was killed. The bereaved father of the deceased, Emmanuel Egemba, a retired Assistant Superintendent of Nigerian Customs, narrated that his daughter called him on the telephone on getting to the centre, informing him that the security guard attached to the centre turned down her request to pass the night on the premises.“ On that Thursday, she left home around 12.30pm, but the bus she boarded at Sango to the centre left around 2pm. She called at 5.30pm that she had arrived there, but the security man at the centre did not open the gate for her and others to pass the night on the premises. I told her to find a place in the area till the following day when she would sit for the exam. Around 7pm, I called her again and she said the security man had opened the gate for them. One hour after, I called again but she did not pick her calls. She was supposed to sit for the exam at 6.30am on Friday. I called her around 12pm on Friday, her phone was switched off. As early as 4am on Saturday, I went to the centre to verify whether she sat for the exam or not. I met the security man and he directed me to the JAMB office in Abeokuta. He denied that he allowed my daughter into the school compound to pass the night. It was a woman that told us that a girl was kidnapped at Oru Junction and taken towards Ijebu Igbo. We later discovered her corpse on Wednesday, March 9. If the candidates were allowed to sleep inside the school, this incident would not have happened I learnt it was rapists that killed her. Her body was not mutilated, but she had cuts in the mouth and thighs. Her clothes and briefs were torn and she had bruises in the back. We prayed before she left home on that day. While we were praying this morning I looked at where she used to sit and it was vacant. ”However, the police have been indicted in not acting fast when the father initially reported that his daughter was missing. A neighbour of the Egembas who said he went to the Awa-Ijebu Police Station to report the case, said:“I followed Emmanuel to the police station on Wednesday, four days after he reported the case, and I asked the DPO if he had visited the school. He said no. He should have gone to the centre instantly to investigate. He is not fit to be a policeman. It was at a building beside the NOUN centre that we got the information that the girl was abducted. We traced her to Ijebu Igbo with her picture. At a motor park there, we showed the picture to a man who told us her corpse was dumped in a bush at the back of a school. I think she struggled with her abductors while they attempted to rape her. We want those that perpetrate this act to be fished out and brought to book.”But the State Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO), DSP Muyiwa Adejobi, said the command was working with its Information and Communication Technology experts to track down the suspects. “We are working on the information we have to get the culprits. Investigation is still ongoing and we are contacting our ICT experts on how we can track down the culprits.”