BREAKING NEWS, Crime
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TEMITOPE Balogun Joshua, prophet and senior pastor of the Synagogue Church of All Nations, SCOAN, and the trustees of the church are to be arraigned before a Lagos high court on Monday, November 30, over the collapse of a six-story building in the church on September 12, 2014, in which 116 were killed.
The trustees will be arraigned before Justice Lawal Akapo alongside the engineers who constructed the collapsed building.
A statement by Bola Akingbade, deputy director, public affairs of the Lagos State Ministry of Justice, on Sunday, November 29, disclosed the scheduled arraignment.
The SCOAN as well as Oladele Ogundeji and Akinbela Fatiregun, two structural engineers, had on July 8, 2015 been indicted by Oyetade Komolafe, Lagos State coroner, who conducted an inquest into the death of the victims the accident.
The engineers appealed the indictment, but Justice Ibrahim Buba of the federal high court in Lagos dismissed the fundamental human rights enforcement suits filed by the engineers who constructed the collapsed six-storey building to stop their planned trial.
The engineers had filed two separate suits before Buba seeking an order restraining the police from inviting, arresting or prosecuting them over the victims’ death.
The Lagos State government had set up a coroner inquest to unravel what went wrong, and in a verdict delivered on August 7, 2015, Oyetade Komolafe, a magistrate and the coroner, indicted the engineers and recommended them for investigation and prosecution for criminal negligence.
The church building, a guest house, collapsed in September 2014, killing 116 people, many of them South Africans who travelled to Nigeria for the church’s service in Lagos.
The inquiry sat for months and gave its ruling on July 8 this year.
— Nov 30, 2015 @ 12:20 GMT
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