Could this be ritual murder?

The discovery of decomposing dead bodies of twin sisters inside an Enugu Business Centre continues to generate shocks, as well as controversies.
What a cruel fate for twin sisters, Jeraldine and Jenevive Ugwuozor of Olo community in Ezeagu council area of Enugu state! The 25 year old identical twins were, on Monday November 3 this year, found stone dead inside a business centre, located at the C To C Plaza, Nkpokiti Junction in Enugu metropolis.
It was learnt that the twins, in a bid to complete a job which was to be unfailingly delivered to the owner on the fateful Monday, chose to work in the business centre throughout the weekend, starting from Saturday November 1. And because of the usual power outage, they employed the use of a generating set to get the job done.
But rather than meeting their target of delivering the job on schedule, the already decomposing bodies of the twin sisters were found littered in different locations inside the shop. The police had, on invitation by curious neighbors who perceived an offensive odour in the area, forced the doors to the shop open to discover the shocking sight.
Currently, the tragic death of the twin sisters is mired in controversy. The police and the deceased family are locked in a battle of wits with each other over the cause of their death.
While police, in its report, submitted that the twins died of Asphyxia (suffocation), the family averred that they could have been murdered. The police report, authored by Fabian Okoye, a Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) and Officer in Charge of Homicide Section (D4), State Criminal Investigation Department (CID), Enugu, is, however, sequel to an earlier autopsy report, signed by Maxwell Ude, Enugu state Police Doctor.
“It is our belief even though for now a hunch, until the police unravel it that these girls were murdered”, the bereaved Ugwuozor asserts in a petition signed on their behalf by their counsel, Nnadiume Awforkansi.
The petition, dated November 7, 2008 and addressed to the Assistant Commissioner of Police In charge of the State CID, says the family is dissatisfied with the quality of investigations into the death of their twin children. The family accuses the police of ‘rushed and jumpy conclusions’ in the matter.
The family, in the petition, discards the autopsy report (carbon monoxide suffocation), insisting that the conclusion is ‘hasty, ungrounded and un-police like’. Countering the police suffocation theory, the grief-stricken family alleges that there was ‘a pool of blood, discharged and still floating on the scene’ as at the time of discovery of the girls’ bodies. Succinctly, Ugwuozor family contends that there would have been no blood trace on the scene had the twin sisters, actually, died of carbon monoxide.
The petition, also, remonstrates that there were evidences of a struggle at the death scene, leading to scattered computers, books and items of merchandise. Awforkansi, the family’s lawyer, in an interview, remarked that the body of one of the twins sprawled on the floor of the adjourning bathroom while the other lay near the exit door. Reasoning that the night watchmen around the area ought to have heard noise of the alleged struggle, the family regrets that the police merely extracted statements from them and set them free without getting them sufficiently quizzed over the incident.
Augustine Okoli, Enugu state Director of National Orientation Agency (NOA), is the owner of the ill-fated business centre. Okoli, in his statement to the police, says it was only one of the girls that were his staff, and that he employed her around October 20 this year. Okoli adds that he was still planning to issue her with an appointment letter before the incident. He, also, stated that he was in Abuja when the girls died.
But Awforkansi counters Okoli’s statement. Indeed, the lawyer quips that a younger niece of the twin sisters said she knew when one of them was employed, and when she was paid her salary. The niece claims that Okoli employed one of the twin sisters on July 4, and paid her first salary on August 4.
The counsel explains the presence of the twin sister not employed by Okoli at the business centre: “What happened was that Okoli employed one of the twin sisters in his business center. The twin sister who worked for Okoli did not get enough jobs. As a result, her twin sister, who was a computer operator in another business center at Abakpa-Nike, a suburb of Enugu, brought some urgent jobs to Okoli’s C To C Plaza, as to complete them on schedule with her”. Awforkansi adds that the twin sisters had, besides, worked together on a number of occasions inside Okoli’s business centre.
Another vexed issue in the petition involves the computer which the twin sisters were working with before the incident. Okoli reportedly told police that the deceased had borrowed a computer monitor (the screen) from someone to do the job, but the family seeks to know the identity of the lender of this monitor.
Thus the petition poses: “The CPU (Central Processing Unit) were scattered. What business has the system unit with carbon monoxide? Above all, who is this client whom these deceased girls were working for? What is the nature of his job? Has he come to claim his job since these girls died? Still, is the hard disk of the computer retrieved? If yes, has the police diagnosed the content to know the type of job these deceased girls were working on and who owns the job?”
Complaining that the police was unable to effectively investigate two women who claimed that they saw the deceased the previous day hale and hearty, the petition alleges that the killers of the twin sisters, by their claims, sold a dummy of carbon monoxide, lamenting that police bought the dummy hook, line and sinker. The petition, therefore, calls for transfer of the matter from the ‘D4 SCID to any other department that will handle the matter with the dexterity it deserves’.
But these allegations by the deceased family notwithstanding, the police have concluded that the twin sisters died of carbon monoxide from the generating set they were using inside the business centre. The command dismisses the claim that the girls were murdered, explaining that while they (the twins) had locked the front door from the outside, the back door was bolted from inside the office. This, according to the command, meant that there was no way anybody would have broken into the office to kill or maim the girls. Police, also, explain that the girls died because they closed up all the windows and doors in the business centre, and still had the generating set functioning beside them, a situation which led to their suffocation by fumes from their generating set.
Another alleged shoddy investigation by police is in the area of Okoli’s attitude after the incident. Rather than contact the family of the deceased twins, Okoli’s alleged first reaction was to call a lady who introduced the twin girl to him on phone. “Why did he call the lady first instead of going to know what transpired?” the family queried. And rather than the police, the family wondered why Okoli, also, allegedly call up the state’s Director of Public Prosecution (DPP), Eze O. Eze, immediately he arrived at the scene (his office). A major grievance of the family against Okoli was that he had never met with them over the tragedy.
The autopsy report, of course, remains a gray area in the autopsy report. The family says they suspect foul-play, maintaining that they were not represented in the exercise. As a matter of fact, the magazine was told that it was Ude, the state police doctor, and Okoli’s personal doctor who conducted the autopsy. Awforkansi submits that even these two medical doctors were not qualified to carry out an autopsy, contending that it is only morbid anatomists who are qualified to touch dead bodies, not general practitioners like the duo. Although the lawyer, in an interview on Monday November 24, disclosed that the doctors performing the post mortem discovered that nipples of the deceased girls were chopped off, a copy of the autopsy sighted by KlinReports does not contain such report.
While the controversies rage, the bodies of the twin sisters seem to have been confiscated at Dona Mortuary in Oji River where they were deposited. The Ugwuozor family is, therefore, calling on the police to release the corpses for burial amidst investigations into the incident.