Panic as unidentified body floats in Eku Water Dam Ogbomoso (PHOTO)
Khalid ABRAHAM
A large crowd gathered at the bank of the Eku Water Dam in Ogbomoso, Oyo state, Friday afternoon as environmental health officers evacuated the remains of a man whose body floated to the surface of the water.
ogbomosoinsightonline.com gathered that people first observed the floating corpse Friday at about noon with the news spreading quickly.
Men of the ministry of environment, Ogbomoso South local government, were subsequently contacted following which the corpse was removed.
“But no one could identify the body,” an eyewitness who gave his name simply as Kehinde told Ogbomoso Insight.
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The dam, popularly called “Wota,” (a Yoruba corruption of water because it is a large pool of water, being the first dam that supplied potable water in Ogbomoso before the commissioning of Oba Dam in the third quarter of the last century), is at the eastern boundaries of Ogbomoso North and South, just at the back of Muslim Comprehensive High School.
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During the administration of late Chief Christopher Adebayo Alao-Akala, contracts were awarded for its resuscitation for supply of water to the teaching hospital of the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (LAUTECH), which he founded in Ogbomoso as an annex of that of Osogbo (before the dissolution of the joint ownership structure of the institution).
However, the water works project was abandoned though lots of work had been executed and equipment supplied.
In recent times public secondary schools’ students in that axis have turned its surrounding area into a theatre of interschool battles often throwing the adjacent residential areas into pandemonium.
Meanwhile, the corpse was not taken away by the health officers, it was rather deposited by the bank of the river/dam.
Neighbours opined the person must have died days earlier and his body only floated to the surface this afternoon.
But as at the time of filing this report his identity remains unknown just as no one has come out to disclose how he died.
