Three-year-old pupil, three others killed in Ogun accident

A three-year-old boy, Excel Ndubuisi, hurrying to school around 8am on Wednesday met untimely death at the Kara end of the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, Ogun State, after he was crushed to death by an articulated truck which developed a mechanical fault.

His mother, Sunshine, who was said to be pregnant, reportedly sustained a fracture, while a motorcycle rider who was taking them to school, escaped with minor injuries.

However, the three occupants of the truck, one of whom was identified as Adewole Adebukola, were killed; their mangled remains were recovered from the Isheri Olofin River under the Kara Bridge by local divers and emergency management workers from Lagos and Ogun states.

When one of our correspondents visited the scene of the incident, he saw the pupil’s schoolbag, which was stuffed with notebooks and a neatly packed extra school uniform.  The yellow uniform was soaked with blood.

Excel’s broken water bottle jutted out from the bag.

One of the mother’s red pair of shoes was still stuck to the Honda motorcycle, which had been put in a police truck.

The bodies of the victims were enclosed in body bags and put into a van belonging to the Federal Road Safety Corps.

The bodies were reportedly deposited in the morgue of the Olabisi Onabanjo University Teaching Hospital, Sagamu.

Officials of the Lagos State Emergency Management Agency, Ogun State Traffic Compliance and Enforcement Corps, Lagos State Fire Service, Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, Lagos State Traffic Management Authority, Lagos State Ambulance Service, and policemen from the Ojodu Abiodun and Isheri divisions were seen struggling to remove the wreckage from the road to free the gridlock that had stretched to the Ojota area of Lagos State.