By Evelyn Usman

The popular Ikeja along bus stop, along Agege motor road, Lagos Tuesday, witnessed an unprecedented crowd, as every passenger who alighted from each commercial bus rushed to have a look at what the matter was on the railway line.  Before you knew it, everyone started shouting, Clifford Orji had come back again!, with a mob pouncing on two men . Soon, the victims were stripped naked.

The men, as gathered ,were  three in number and were always seen on the railway line in tattered  clothes  begging for alms. But trouble started for them that fateful day after one of them was sighted making a call with  a  personal sophisticated mobile phone. Out of curiosity, one of the passers-by reportedly went closer, only to discover that they were eating a large chunk of what he concluded to be roasted human part.

He immediately raised an alarm, consequent upon which the beggars were descended on. In the process, one of them managed to escape, leaving his colleagues to their fate. Their problem was compounded after one person from the crowd declared that the men had a hideout around the Ikeja local government.

A search was conducted in their ramshackle make shift abode where some knives, charms, cutlasses and more chunks of meat which was further concluded to be human flesh were discovered. They were at the verge of being set ablaze when policemen from Area ‘F’ arrived and saved their day.

Before they were whisked away by the policemen, some men in mufti who claimed to  be security operatives managed to rescue them from the mob and the following explanation by one of the victims who identified himself as Alaba Abiodun who sounded desperate ensued:

“ Please  help us call the police. I am not Clifford Orji and I do not even know who the person is. Is the person a Yoruba man? Because I am from Ogun, precisely from Ilaro, Yewa. I am a carpenter and I do not kill or eat human beings.

The suspects rescued by policemen from the mob.

I only come here to beg in order to get money to buy my carpentery tools . I do not even have money to rent a shop to start my trade.  . I met this man , Samuel and the other Taju, here. The place they went to is where I use as my home. I just did it because I can not afford to rent an apartment. ”

Asked where he got the large portion of the suspected human parts from, he screamed,  “God forbid! This is not human meat. Oga I beg test it and see if it is. It is cow meat. We added money and bought it. But we could not buy other ingredients so we decided to eat it like that when we were hungry.”

Sighting policemen in a van, Alaba muttered  “thank God”, before they were whisked away.

When Crime Alert contacted Area ‘F’ for the outcome of its findings, a senior policeman who spoke on condition of anonymity informed that they had been released after discovering that the meat was after all not human flesh as claimed.

The officer therefore warned members of the public against raising false alarm and taking the law into their hands, pointing out that the men would have been killed without any justifiable cause had the Police not arrived on time.