Human rights lawyer and a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Femi Falana, says that his legal team will establish the ‘massive cover-up’ in the controversy trailing the death of Dowen college student, Sylvester Oromoni (Jnr).
Speaking in an interview with Channels TV on January 10, Falana who is the counsel to the Oromoni family, said this while reacting to the recent press statement by Lagos police commissioner, Hakeem Odumosu, who said that the autopsies carried out on Sylvester’s body indicated he died a natural death.
Responding to Odumosu’s comment, Falana said;
“You don’t go on air and be making a mockery of the death of a human being. As you are well aware, by our culture, if you lose a loved one, to break the news, sometimes the school authorities would engage the services of imams or pastors to meet the parents and break the news. That means you are being compassionate and considerate and humane.
You don’t go on air to members of the public ‘Oh the boy they claimed was poisoned. Nothing happened to him. He died naturally”. What do you mean by natural causes? Cancer? Heart attack? There is no mention of natural in the report. The commissioner cannot say that Sylvester died of Natural causes because what are natural causes? Heart attack, stroke, cancer and so on and so forth.
But if a boy took ill, you claim he was injured on the football pitch but the boy before his death told the parents ‘I was given to drink a concoction by those who wanted to force me to join a secret society on campus’
Doctors would be expected to eliminate this allegations and the first report concluded and stated very clearly that the boy died of acute lung injury due to chemical intoxication.
A doctor would not write such a report if he hasn’t seen anything. No doctor in the world, unless you want to play with your license, would state categorically the causeof death that can be questionned.
The parents have asked for the second autopsy report, it has not been made available. The parents are reading about this other report. On their behalf as lawyers, we have applied for certified true copies, it has not been made available to us.
We are going to establish evidence of a massive cover-up. You say there wasn’t evidence that there was a secret society. How? We searched the suspect and didn’t find any tattoo, we didn’t find any insignia. Is that how to prove evidence of a secret society?” he said.
