Oyigbo Killings: Man Reveals How His Fiancée Was Shot Dead By Army

A man identified as Monday Bakor in an interview with Premium Times disclosed how his 30-year-old fiancée, Queen Nwazuo was killed by troops of the Nigerian Army who were on a reprisal mission in Oyigbo, Rivers State.

AllNews learnt that Nwazuo's marriage to Bakor, was scheduled for February and the preparation for the event had long begun.

Nwazuo, an orphan, was shot dead on Thursday, October 22, as she and Bakor were trying to lock the latter’s shop at 12B Ehi Street as residents scurried to safety from soldiers who were shooting indiscriminately at unarmed civilians in Oyigbo town.

Bakor said, “They did not care,” a distraught Bakor told PREMIUM TIMES as he sobbed intermittently.

“They were directly shooting at people. It was not stray bullets. They were directly shooting people. They killed people and they were using grammar to explain it.

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“They came to the street where people were and I saw everybody as they were locking their shops. I was rushing to lock mine when a bullet pierced through the iron door of my shop. I saw particles all over me but the bullet hit my fiancée and she fell.

“I did not even care if they would kill me. I carried her to the hospital with the help of a person who brought a bike. It was at the hospital, Divine Light, that she was confirmed dead. Nobody was confronting anybody in that area. I am not IPOB. I don’t meet with anybody. You can only see me at my house and church and that shop.

“I am angry. They killed innocent people and they are still denying it. They killed a woman I am about to marry next February. I opened this shop for us to make some money to use for her return to school.”

Bakor said he and his late partner had fled Oyigbo to Etche on Wednesday, before they returned on Thursday, believing calm had returned. He said he took the woman’s remains to a mortuary around Timber Road in Oyigbo. 

Informants at another mortuary at the Imo River, which a resident, Emmanuel Maduabuchi helped locate, said families were bringing dead bodies to deposit amid the siege.

“It was divine grace that I was not also killed when I took her to hospital and later to the mortuary. Everywhere was dry and there were shootings everywhere,”.

In another report, leader of the outlawed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Nnamdi Kanu has vowed that the clash between his members and Nigerian security forces in Oyigbo, Rivers State, "will not be without consequences".