Tears for Abuja bomb blast victim .....As bereaved family blasts FG, police over daughter’s death

Chinyere Mariam Edoziem was one of the victims of the bomb blast that occurred at the Nyanya area of Abuja on April 14, 2014.

Ten months after the incident that claimed no fewer than 71 lives, the lady’s family members are still labouring hard to come to terms with the reality that their sister, a graduate of the University of Port- Harcourt, was gone forever. Chinyere’s death and the attendant pain are still fresh in the minds of the family members.

Chinyere, 42, was not residing in Abuja before her demise. Until her tragic death, the young lady had studied and was staying in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital. Unfortunately, cruel fate crossed her path when she went to Abuja on an official assignment. Her family members and friends had bade her farewell and wished her a safe return, unknown to them that she had embarked on a journey of no return.

Still mourning and in sheer agony, Chinyere’s elder sister, Ngozi Iringe-Koko, told Daily Sun that the incident that led to her sister’s death still appeared to her like a dream. According to her, she was still expecting that her late sister would someday miraculously return from her trip to Abuja. Describing her sister as a quintessential lady who cared for her family members, Iringe-Koko said she would have preferred that the story of her death was untrue.

The deceased, who was a graduate of Marketing, hailed from Umudagu Mbbieri in Mbaitoli Local Government area of Imo State. She was survived by her mother and six siblings.

Chinyere might have gone, but the pain of her death has remained palpable in the minds of her family members, just as the vacuum that her departure left behind remains.

Iringe-Koko stated that her pain was aggravated with the fact that Chinyere might not have died if she had received urgent help from the appropriate authorities. According to her, the deceased’s body was intact when she was later found in the mortuary. She noted that the autopsy revealed that Chinyere died of traumatic pains.

Recollecting her sister’s last conversation with her colleague, Iringe-Koko said: “About 6.40am on April 14, 2014, my sister called her colleague to remind their company bus driver that was commissioned to pick her up at Nyanya Motor Park. Unfortunately, before the driver could get to the park, all efforts to reach my sister through her mobile telephone line proved abortive. When her colleagues got the news of the bomb blast that same morning, they were all panicking.”

She stated that the company where her sister worked quickly contacted her and informed her of the development. According to her, her late sister chose her as the next of kin.

“Her establishment called to inform me that my sister could not be reached since the explosion happened. For the fact that her vehicle was arriving at that same park where the bomb blast happened, and when we continued the search without any success, it dawned on us that she might have been involved in the incident. And that was where our ordeal started.

“After five days of fruitless search by her colleagues and friends, I left for Abuja from Lagos in search of her corpse. Before then, her colleagues had gone to all the hospitals where the surviving victims were deposited but she was not found. Her corpse was not also among others in the mortuary. On April 22, I eventually found her corpse in the morgue, at the National Hospital, Abuja. Her corpse was tagged ‘Unknown female.’

“I was surprised when I saw that Chinyere’s corpse was intact. There were no bruises or cuts in her body; even her clothes were not torn. I strongly believe that she would have survived if assistance had got to her on time. She died out of carelessness by our emergency rescue teams,” she said.

She recalled how her family went through hell while trying to recover the body of her sister. She said the administrative bottlenecks they went through before they could retrieve their sister’s corpse for burial further added to their sorrow.

“I thought the police were going to release her body to us immediately for burial. On the contrary, the entire process turned into a nightmare. We were referred from one office to another. We spent three days before we could get the coroner’s letter for her autopsy. We saw hell both in the hands of the police and the hospital’s mortuary attendants. And immediately the corpse was released to us, we never received any message of consolation from the government. The only people that stood by us were the delegation from the place where she worked –the Nigeria Meteorological Agency. They were physically present during her burial ceremony and they did all they could to comfort us in our time of grief.

“We have missed her and we will surely continue to miss her because Chinyere was like a mother to us all. She was so loving and caring, and she always ensured that her family benefited from her kindness. Her demise left a vacuum that no one can fill. She was like a thread that knitted our family together. She cared and checked on us almost on daily basis. But now that she is gone, no one does that anymore,” she said.

As she mourned her beloved sister, Iringe- Koko also expressed her condolences to other Nigerians who had lost their loved ones as a result of the evil activities of the Boko Haram sect. She tasked political office holders and security personnel to use their good offices to tackle the insurgency ravaging many parts of the country.