The suspected killer of the Commandant of the Armed Forces Command Secondary School and Staff College (AFCSC), Jaji, Navy Commander Oluwayemisi Ogundana, has not only confessed to the crime, but military investigators have also unearthed the reason for the dastardly act.
A report on this in Tuesday’s edition of The Nation captured dramatic encounters between the late Mrs. Ogundana and her suspected killer, Bernard Simon, a teacher in the school. Mr. Simon is currently in custody and undergoing interrogation alongside an alleged accomplice identified as Ibrahim Mamman.
The report quoted a source as disclosing that the deceased officer had recently been posted to the Nigerian Navy School of Engineering (NNSE), Sapele, Delta State, and was waiting for the officer to take over from her before she was gruesomely killed in her residence. Her dismembered body, put in a sack, was found in a shallow well.
A source close to the deceased was quoted as saying: “The woman was reserved. She was a meek and quiet person. She was left-handed and stammered a bit too. The claim by the teacher that she promised him N2.5 million was pure nonsense because it is impossible. Where would she have got the money in the first place?
“The truth is that Mr. Bernard was the Secretary of the Parents Teachers Association (PTA) and he went about complaining that the Commandant was blocking them from making money.
“Commander Ogundana heard it and confronted him. She asked him what he meant by saying she was blocking them from making money.
“She said it was obvious she will not be able to work with him and told the chairman of the PTA that they should remove him. The Commander was a very straight forward woman.
“There was a meeting with the PTA and when she came in, she saw that Mr. Simon was acting as secretary. She said she was not going to take part in the meeting unless he stepped aside. She stood outside until the chairman told the secretary to leave the books for his deputy.
“Days after, she told her PA that the teacher came to her house; that someone knocked her door, and when she looked through the window, she saw it was the teacher. She asked what he was doing at her house and he said he came to apologise for all the wrongs he had done.
“She told him it was wrong to come to her house, and that if he wanted to apologise, he could do that in the office. The Commandant did not allow people into her house. The only people with access to her house were her aide and her sister who lives in Jaji.
“Her PA also said the teacher came to her office and apologised. She was already packing her things to leave the school because she had been posted out.
“It was one of the bags she bought that her killers used to pack her body. They killed her inside her room and mutilated her body, took it out and dumped it inside a well. It is so disheartening what they did to her because that woman did not deserve to die that way.”
On how Cdr. Ogundana was discovered to be missing days before her dismembered body was found, the source disclosed that her assistant was the first to notice that something was wrong because her boss requested her to buy some snacks on her way home.
According to the report, “After buying the snack in town, the aide went to her residence but found her door shut.
“It was gathered that the aide called her mobile telephone line many times without response, an unusual development that triggered the suspicion.
“She was said to have contacted the woman’s sister who told her she might have gone for a meeting, if she was not in her apartment.”
The source said: “She went home and returned the next day, yet she did not see her madam. But she observed a strange thing; the net leading to her apartment was torn.
“At the same time, her husband was said to have been worried because he had not been able to reach her, which was strange. They told him they were having the same challenge and he advised that they should make a report since it had been days already.”
