The Lagos State Police Command has arrested a middle-aged mother of three, Linda Alapa, for allegedly beating her 10-year-old housemaid, Joy Mbafan, to death.
Punch reports that the sad incident happened on Bolanle Oduniyi Street, Okegbegun, in the Ikorodu area of the state, where the deceased lived with the suspect and her family.
It was gathered that Alapa was flogging the girl for an undisclosed offence around 3 am on Monday, December 19, 2019, when she lost consciousness and died afterwards.
A police report on the incident has it that at the Ikorodu General Hospital morgue where the corpse of the victim was deposited, a doctor on duty was said to have noticed marks of violence on the body and alerted the police at the Sagamu Road Division.
A police source said that Alapa has already confessed to beating the girl, adding that she would soon be charged to court with murder.
“She wanted to absolve herself of the death of the victim, but for the doctor on duty who raised the alarm after a close examination and she was arrested.
There are marks of violence on the body of the deceased and she did not deny beating her,” the police source explained.
Some neighbours who spoke about the incident said they had warned Alapa many times to desist from assaulting the victim, but she would not listen to anyone, not only beating the deceased but starving her of food several times.
A neighbour who gave her name as Ellen, said although no one knew why she beat the girl at that unholy hours, Alapa usually beat the girl for messing up their apartment.
“Around 3 am on the day the girl died, I heard her crying as the woman (Alapa) flogged her. I woke up my husband to intervene. He said he was tired of the woman’s insults.
After a while, she stopped crying. It was when I came back from work that afternoon that I saw a crowd on our premises in tears.
They said Joy (Mbafan) was dead. The woman’s husband was not at home that day. It was the landlord that told him about the incident on the telephone.”
Another neighbour said the girl’s father was late while her mother was ill, adding that Alapa had brought her to Lagos from a village in the eastern part of Nigeria.
“But she used to beat up and starve the girl of food. On several occasions, the girl would come to me to eat, saying her aunty did not give her food.”
The State Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO), SP Dolapo Badmos, has confirmed the incident, saying the suspect has been arrested and is undergoing interrogation at the moment while an autopsy will be conducted on the corpse of the late girl to determine the cause of death.
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