Incidences of lovers being found dead inside vehicles around
Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital have been generating reactions from the Kano
public. While some residents blame the incidents on poor security vigilance,
others point fingers at what they see as an emerging social problem associated
with the proliferation of social networking on mobile phones and the internet.
A man and a lady were on March 14, 2012 found dead inside
a Peugeot 406 car at Kundila quarters around the precinct of Aminu Kano
Teaching Hospital in Kano. The young man, Abba Abubakar was said to have
received the vehicle, with registration number AW 576 KMC, from his brother
Ahmad Lawan Maduwa the previous night for repairs the following morning.
But he was found dead by passersby in the morning, with a lady, identified by
relatives as Ummul Khair Muhammad inside the car.
Their bodies bore no sign of injuries from any violent
encounter, although the police in Kano blamed their deaths on poisoning after
conducting an autopsy. The two were believed to have met through a social
networking forum on Blackberry phones.
Now almost two months later, the lifeless bodies of
another man and woman, Najib Aliyu Yunusa and Nadiya Abdullahi Gwammaja
respectively were discovered decomposing at a quiet area inside Aminu Kano
Teaching Hospital by passersby who were attracted by an odious smell that was
oozing from a heavily tinted saloon car and seeping into nearby hospital
buildings.
A source from the lady’s family, who claimed to be her
younger brother, said Nadiya was a divorcee and had a 6-year-old daughter from
her last marriage, while Najib, a manager of a filling station in Abuja, was
merely her ‘blackberry fiend’ who was also married and had two children.
“We discovered that she obtained the contact of the
deceased man from one of her closest female friends in our area,” he said.
A hospital official said after patients complained about
some strange smell, workers traced the source of the odour to the car in which
the decomposing bodies were found at about 7pm last Monday.
“The deceased were suspected to have died since Friday when
they came there and parked; only God knows what happened, Aminu Inuwa Ringim,
the hospital’s spokesman told reporters.
People, who were in the area when the corpses were
evacuated, said there was no sign of physical injuries or violence on them.
“The only unusual thing was that blood was seen trickling down the noses of
both corpses which were swollen up”, a patient’s relative, Musa Garba, told our
reporter.
Garba observed that it would be difficult to say if
anybody was behind their deaths because the vehicle in which deceased were
found was uncommonly secluded.
“The car looked well parked in the power house area, which
is shady because it has many trees. The vehicle’s screens and glasses were so
dark that it was unlikely for anybody to know there were people in it. They
might have probably been poisoned elsewhere before they came into the
hospital”, he noted.
A medical source, who spoke to our reporter on condition
of anonymity, lamented that the hospital has been allowed to be used by some
people as a relaxation and not a health centre.
“People come into the hospital and park their vehicles
indiscriminately without any security personnel identifying them. In some
instances, there are people that park their vehicles inside this hospital and
leave them there for weeks and even months before they come back to pick them.
This happens as a result of insufficient surveillance by the hospital’s
security officials”, he complained.
“There are some young men that even come into this
hospitals in search of girlfriends or fix appointments with their girlfriends
in this hospital because they take advantage of the little vigilance on the
hospital”, he added.
The spokesman of the hospital, Ringim, who reacted to the
claims, argued that people could not be prevented from coming into the hospital
because it is a public place.
“We do our best to restrict movements of vehicles into
this hospital, especially in the evening, but most of them give many types of
pretexts just to secure entry. Some people will tell you that they have come to
withdrew money from ATM machines in the hospital since we have banks, but you
may find them elsewhere inside the hospitals. What you need to understand is
that there is no way you can read the motives of all those people that come
into the hospital” he said.
He said only staff members, who travel for seminars or
assignments park their vehicles in the hospital and leave them for weeks, but
not members of the public. “And we have introduced a policy to regulate such
practices. Any staff member who wishes to park his/her vehicle inside this
hospital for days or weeks must secure permission from the management before
they do so. Otherwise they may be doing so at their own peril. We believe that
this step will help in identifying those who come into the hospital and park
their vehicles arbitrarily”, he said.
On whether the hospital is turning into a ‘lovers’ nest’,
Ringim said that “at times you see couples sitting and chatting on some of the
benches that have been provided around the hospitals, but you can’t just start
interrogating these kinds of couples on their mission at the hospital. It
doesn’t make sense”.
A parent, Maryam Fagge, 40, opined that there is a need
for parents and guardians to re-examine the use of latest mobile phones like
blackberry and other gadgets which come with social networking facilities in
them among young people in the society, notably women.
“This alarming trend should be a source of concern for all
parents because it is turning our children into something else. You may not
believe it if I tell you that our teenage daughters now abandon the house
chores and instead spend more than 15 hours chatting with strangers on
blackberry messaging or Face book. That’s how they become used by strange men
who later lure them into following them to relaxation or entertainment centers
without their parents knowledge or consent”, she lamented.
She advised other parents to exercise control over their
children by monitoring their use of mobile phones and the internet strictly.
“These technological inventions are not bad in themselves but the way young
people abuse them is the main reason parents perceive them negatively. These
social networks are just like a knife. It’s a tool that we buy for useful
purposes like cutting meat or tomato, but it could also be used to stab or
slaughter a human being”, Fagge observed.
As at the time of filing this report, nobody could say for
sure what caused the deaths of the couples. The Kano police commissioner, Mr.
Ibrahim K. Idris, who briefed reporters yesterday, said that the post mortem
samples taken from the dead person have been sent to Lagos for forensic
analysis to determine the cause of their deaths.