{"id":91690,"date":"2024-09-24T17:24:25","date_gmt":"2024-09-24T17:24:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/?p=91690"},"modified":"2024-09-24T17:24:25","modified_gmt":"2024-09-24T17:24:25","slug":"supreme-court-justice-wants-dss-to-investigate-strange-hit-and-run-death-of-son","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/?p=91690","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court justice wants DSS to investigate ‘strange hit and run death’ of son"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

A part of the letter which was received by the DSS on 4th September 2004 reads: \u201cI\u00a0am writing to report the tragic death of my son, Aliyu \u00a0Musa\u00a0Dattijo, aged 44, which occurred on the 20th of August,\u00a02024, between 8:30 pm and 9:30 pm, \u00a0at the Sani Abacha Express Way, by Wuse under bridge Utako, Abuja.\u00a0 Aliyu\u2026 was said to have left home around\u00a0 7:30 pm to meet with\u00a0an unidentified\u00a0person for business\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe preliminary police report states that \u00a0Aliyu was a victim of \u2018a hit and run fatal motor\/pedestrian accident\u2019 which resulted to his death at the spot of the incident. \u00a0His\u00a0car \u00a0(Peugeot\u00a0406\u00a0with registration number \u00a0ABC 40 AW) \u00a0was found by the aforesaid highway, under the Wuse Market pedestrian bridge, with the door open and keys nowhere to be found\u2026The intervention\u00a0of your office \u00a0(SSS) is humbly \u00a0sought \u00a0to aid with \u00a0the investigation\u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

According to a family source, \u201cIn 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\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAt 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\u2019t going through.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAround 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, \u2018Look, this is what is happening, and she might need support because it\u2019s late at night.\u2019 He agreed to meet her there.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cShe was told that he was found under the Wuse market bridge. She was like, \u2018how can this be a hit and run? \u00a0He has a vehicle. What then is the correlation?\u201d \u00a0We all needed to understand what was going on.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI got to the station at around 12:30, and at that time, we hadn\u2019t even seen the body because they didn\u2019t allow us to see it. Eventually, some male members of the family stayed behind while the females were asked to home.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThey 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe 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\u2019s battling with cancer so she\u2019s been on chemotherapy at CedarCrest but that\u2019s a different story. It was from that particular document that they retrieved her phone number. That\u2019s the IPO and that\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cFor us, it\u2019s 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\u2019t think any right-thinking person at night, at around 9:30 would go and park his vehicle at that point at that place.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAbout 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. \u00a0We feel there might be more to this.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s not like he was trying to cross the road. Something definitely is not adding up, you know.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u25cf Report by Law and Society magazine.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 A part of the letter which was received by the DSS on 4th September 2004 reads: \u201cI\u00a0am […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":61507,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5807,7],"tags":[6798,169,4164],"class_list":["post-91690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-crime-and-violence","category-news","tag-datijo","tag-dss","tag-hit-run"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=91690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91690\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/61507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=91690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=91690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=91690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}