Ibadan Explosion: Nobody Has Shown Up To Claim Ownership Of Explosives-Stored House, Makinde’s Aide

Despite the series of agitations and apprehension about the cause and consequence of last Tuesday’s tragic explosion, with the whereabouts of the occupants still unknown, the Special Adviser on Security to Governor Seyi Makinde, Fatai Owoseni, has declared that the owner of the house in which explosives were allegedly kept, has not shown up for identification.

Owoseni, who spoke on Ibadan-based FM Radio Station on Saturday, said four to five days after the blast in which the twin duplex was completely levelled, whoever owns the building has not been known because nobody has shown up to be the owner.

According to him, the executive members of the Dejo Oyelese Close, Bodija Landlord Association also have not been able to disclose who the real owner of the house is.

He, however, corroborated with the previous claim by an executive of the Landlord Association that the known tenant that rented the building is Mahmud Kamara, a Malian Motorcyclist and an alleged United Nations (UN) official.

Reports have it that Kamara was cohabiting the house with a miner, Sewane Youssouf, who allegedly stored the explosives that wrecked havoc in the area, destroying about 58 buildings, wounding 77 persons, and killing five persons, including a UK returnee.

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His words: “We have been working with the members of the Adeyi community in Bodija, as well as, the executive of the Landlord Association to know the owner of the house in question. We have not seen anybody come out and claim he is the owner of the house. What they know is that one national of Mali by the the name of Kamara rented the house”, he said.

Despite the series of claims about Kamara and Sewane: that they entered the building about an hour before the blast, and left a few minutes after a fire was seen engulfing the next building, before the horrific ban, Owoseni said investigations are still on to get the whereabouts and identities of the occupants.

Because the house was leveled and sunk, some people believe that the occupants might have been buried in the rubble, going by the discovery on Thursday afternoon of some body parts of a man during the excavation. The caterpillar working on the rubble exhumed the body parts, giving the suspicion that some other bodies might still be buried underground in the collapsed buildings.

The Red Cross officials had on Wednesday morning used a technological device to test the grounds at the site to discover if anybody was breathing underground. Their discovery was that no breathing was heard, meaning that nobody living was underground. This however did not preclude the fact that dead beings might have been trapped there.