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Olugbemi. Adeyinka Ogunleye
2 days ago
Overview
JANUARY 15th 1966: A MORNING OF MURDER, MAYHEM AND CARNAGE - Part 3
..This was because he gave me hope and he spoke with kindness and compassion. At that point all the fear and trepidation left me.
With new-found confidence I went rushing to my mother who was still screaming on the balcony and told her to stop crying because the soldier had promised that they would not kill my father and that everything would be okay.
I held on to the words of that soldier and that morning, despite all that was going on around me, I never cried again.
Four years ago when he was still alive I made contact with and spoke to Captain Nwobosi, the mutineer who led the team to our house and that led the Ibadan operation that night about these events.
He confirmed my recollection of what happened in our house saying that he remembered listening to my mother screaming and watching me cry.
He claimed that he was the officer that had comforted me and assured me that my father would not be killed.
I have no way of confirming if it was really him but I have no reason to doubt his words.
He later asked me to write the foreword of his book which sadly he never launched or released because he passed away a few months later.
The mutineers took my father away and as the lorry drove off my mother kept on wailing and crying and so was everyone else in the house except for me.
From there they went to the home of Chief S.L. Akintola a great statesman and nationalist and a very dear uncle of mine.
My mother had phoned Akintola to inform him of what had happened in our home.
She was sceaming down the phone asking where her husband had been taken and by this time she was quite hysterical.
Chief Akintola tried to calm her down assuring her that all would be well.
When they got to Akintola’s house he already knew that they were coming and he was prepared for them.
Instead of coming out to meet them, he had stationed some of his policemen inside the house and they started shooting.
A gun battle ensued and consequently the mutineers were delayed by at least one hour.
According to the Special Branch reports and the official statements of the mutineers that survived that night and that were involved in the operation their plan had been to pick up my father and Chief Akintola from their homes in Ibadan, take them to Lagos, gather them together with the other political leaders that had been abducted and then execute them all together.
The difficulty they had was that Akintola resisted them and he and his policemen ended up wounding two of the soldiers that came to his home.
One of the soldiers, whose name was apparently James, had his fingers blown off and the other had his ear blown off.
After some time Akintola’s ammunition ran out and the shooting stopped.
His policemen stood down and they surrendered. He came out waving a white handkerchief and the minute he stepped out they just slaughtered him.
My father witnessed Akintola’s cold-blooded murder in utter shock, disbelief and horror because he was tied up in the back of the lorry from where he could see everything that transpired.
The soldiers were apparently enraged by the fact that two of their men had been wounded and that Akintola resisted and delayed them.
After they killed him they moved on to Lagos with my father.
When they got there they drove to the Officer’s Mess at Dodan Barracks in Ikoyi where they tied him up, sat him on the floor of a room, and placed him under close arrest by surrounding him with six very hostile and abusive soldiers.
Thankfully about two hours later he was rescued, after a dramatic gun battle, by loyalist troops led by one Lt. Tokida who stormed the room with his men and who was under the command of Captain Paul Tarfa (as he then was).
They had been ordered to free my father by Lt. Col. Yakubu Gowon who was still in control of the majority of troops in Dodan Barracks and who remained loyal to the Federal Government.
Credit: Femi Fani-Kayode
