Following the strange death of his eldest son, a retired justice of the Supreme Court, Hon. Justice Mohammed Musa Dattijo, (JSC) has asked the Department of State Services (DSS) to investigate and unravel the mystery surrounding the death.
A part of the letter which was received by the DSS on 4th September 2004 reads: “I am writing to report the tragic death of my son, Aliyu Musa Dattijo, aged 44, which occurred on the 20th of August, 2024, between 8:30 pm and 9:30 pm, at the Sani Abacha Express Way, by Wuse under bridge Utako, Abuja. Aliyu… was said to have left home around 7:30 pm to meet with an unidentified person for business…
“The preliminary police report states that Aliyu was a victim of ‘a hit and run fatal motor/pedestrian accident’ which resulted to his death at the spot of the incident. His car (Peugeot 406 with registration number ABC 40 AW) was found by the aforesaid highway, under the Wuse Market pedestrian bridge, with the door open and keys nowhere to be found…The intervention of your office (SSS) is humbly sought to aid with the investigation…”
According to a family source, “In the evening of 20th of August at 6:30 pm, he mentioned to his wife at home that somebody had called and asked to meet up with him. He’s into construction and several other businesses, so we assume that it has to be one of these streams of business that he had to meet that person for. That evening, he went out with a 406 Peugeot saloon while his wife and the driver went shopping with the Red Hilux that he uses often since they were going to make a lot of purchases.
“At about 8:20 pm, his wife received a phone call from him, asking if they had gone back home and all of that and she confirmed that, they were already home. According to her, he asked if it was raining where she was and she said yes. He now told her that he would be heading back home soon, but she never heard from him. When it was about 10 pm, she started calling his phone, which never went through. She thought that was odd because it was very unlike him to go MIA (Missing In Action) like that. She kept on trying his phone, but it wasn’t going through.
“Around 11:20, 11:30 pm, she received a phone call from somebody who identified himself as the IPO (Investigating Police Officer). The IPO only told her to come and meet him at the Utako police station. She got dressed but she knew there was something wrong. Before heading to the police station, she called one of her brothers to say, ‘Look, this is what is happening, and she might need support because it’s late at night.’ He agreed to meet her there.
“When she got there, she saw his vehicle; she saw the IPO; who said there had been a hit-and-run accident, which involved the victim that was driving that particular car, and the person is dead.
“She was told that he was found under the Wuse market bridge. She was like, ‘how can this be a hit and run? He has a vehicle. What then is the correlation?” We all needed to understand what was going on. She was told that two Nile University students had seen the body and called, I think the Wuse Police station, when they did not come, they reached out to the Utako police station.
“I got to the station at around 12:30, and at that time, we hadn’t even seen the body because they didn’t allow us to see it. Eventually, some male members of the family stayed behind while the females were asked to home. Subsequently, he was released to them and then they proceeded to take the body to the central mosque so that they would help to prepare the body. It was at the mosque they now saw the state in which the body was in.
“They noticed a lot of gashes; stab wounds on his hands, like somebody had tried to cut him with an axe or something. Offensive wounds. They noticed that there was a stab wound on his stomach, which led to his gut spilling out. And then his legs looked like they were crushed under a vehicle. And then obviously his skull too was, you know, cracked and all of that. So having seen the way the body was, they asked the police officers to take them where the incident happened; which they did.
“The information we have is that the car was parked right under that bridge and that it was neatly packed. And a few meters away from where that car was packed, they found the body. The car doors were said to be wide open. Nothing was taken. There was no sign of any forceful course entry. No form of disturbance in the car. In fact, he had bought chocolates for the children, which he had kept on the passenger side and was still recovered from the police station. So nobody had touched anything.
“We found out that the police were able to communicate with the wife because they saw her phone number in a petition she had filed against CedarCrest which was in the car. She’s battling with cancer so she’s been on chemotherapy at CedarCrest but that’s a different story. It was from that particular document that they retrieved her phone number. That’s the IPO and that’s how they got her The police said they checked the car. The car was very neat. Everything was okay but the only thing they saw was there was no key in the ignition.
“For us, it’s a lot of questions and a lot of speculations. What we have confirmed, and what also the police have confirmed, is that the assault was not done in the vehicle. It was done outside of his vehicle. The attack must have been elsewhere, as there was no sign of struggle on his vehicle, and no evidence was retrieved from that vehicle at all. Given the location of this pace, I don’t think any right-thinking person at night, at around 9:30 would go and park his vehicle at that point at that place.
“About a week after he passed, the wife claimed that one of her sisters used his Hilux to run an errand, and she noticed that she was being trailed. Upon noticing that, she sped up and tried to outrun the person, but the person kept on coming close. Luckily, she was close to an estate and immediately she entered, they retreated and stopped chasing her. They have now parked that vehicle. But nothing like that has happened again. We feel there might be more to this.
“It’s not a coincidence because his wife and her brother mentioned at a point in time that, there had been instances where he said he felt he was being trailed. One more thing is, how did the police conclude immediately without any investigation that this was a case of hit and run? That’s too hasty. They saw his vehicle. They towed his vehicle. They saw where the body lay and then you are now coming to say hit and run. It’s not like he was trying to cross the road. Something definitely is not adding up, you know.”
● Report by Law and Society magazine.
