The Soje story took a twist when the police alleged that the deceased suffered from partial stroke before he committed suicide.
In a related development, the immediate younger brother of the deceased, Mr Cornelius Soje, said the Director’s wife’s action may have pushed him to suicide. Cornelius alleged that the woman turned his brother to her puppet. According to him, unknown to many people, his late brother and his wife actually had a child three years into their marriage who died eight days after birth. Thereafter, he said the wife suffered multiple miscarriages.
The brother narrated that when some years ago the wife was transferred to Abuja from Lokoja, the development caused trouble in their relationship. He said his brother always narrated his family troubles to him. Cornelius, however, said that after some time, the deceased stopped complaining to him and he thought the troubles had been resolved until he announced the birth of the triplets.
“My late brother called me on the phone and expressed to me that he was disallowed from naming the kids. It was the wife who gave the kids names. My late brother was not permitted to give them names. The wife did”, he alleged.
“My brother called me on the phone and told me that his wife said he was not the father of the triplets. My brother thought it was a joke until the woman stressed it to him by asking, ‘How can you think you are the owners of the babies?’
“My brother said he could not forget the statement and was seriously distressed by it. I told him not to take his wife’s statement serious but view it as a woman’s careless talk.”
Cornelius further quoted Soje as saying that immediately after the conversation took place, the wife asked him to go to her Abuja apartment to prepare food for her.
“He left the hospital and that was the last time anybody saw my brother alive”, he said.
The brother claimed that from the Saturday when the deceased went missing, the wife did not notify any family member until the following Tuesday when she called his sibling, Mrs Alice Turkwo, in Ilorin.
“It was my sister in Ilorin who told me the wife called to say our brother was missing. When she did around 6pm on that Tuesday, I called her on phone but she kept telling me not to disturb her as she had migraine and needed to rest. Out of annoyance I ended the call. I tried to call her line later but, since then, she had put off her phone and none of us could reach her. It was a friend who hinted us of a suicide story in town. We checked with the army and discovered it was actually our brother that was in the photograph taken before they invited the police to take over the case”, he narrated. Cornelius dismissed the claim that it was financial depression that led his brother to commit suicide. His words,
“The unpaid salary had nothing to do with his taking his life. My brother had been surviving without salary for months, why now? He could survive without salary for two years. The house he sold at Zariagi was because he didn’t like the location and he had started using the proceeds to build another one around Phase Two, Lokoja.”
The brother said Soje sold a car three years ago because he had another one. He claimed that the deceased actually suffered stroke around 2008 but had been healed and was driving himself as well as carrying out other tasks for more than five years now. Cornelius said the family was not interested in any autopsy by the police.
Their interest, according to him, was to take possession of his sibling’s body and bury him quietly. He said they had accepted their fate but still viewed the triplets as theirs. “Whether the claim by the wife, as reported to me by our late brother, that he was not the father of the triplets is true or not, the kids are innocent. And we are ready to take them as ours. And we’ll help them. My brother was a good man. We were the only two male children of our parents”, he added.
( Vanguard)
