Two security guards, Ayuba Idris and Tasur Abubakar, were sentenced to death by hanging by the Ondo State High Court in Akure, the state capital, for the armed robbery and murder of their 71-year-old Ghanaian boss, Kwaku Richard Kwakye, and his daughter, Tope Kwakye.
The convicts were charged in 2019 with murdering the father and daughter.
Two security guards, Ayuba Idris and Tasur Abubakar, were sentenced to death by hanging by the Ondo State High Court in Akure, the state capital, for the armed robbery and murder of their 71-year-old Ghanaian boss, Kwaku Richard Kwakye, and his daughter, Tope Kwakye.
The convicts were charged in 2019 with murdering the father and daughter.
They worked as security guards at Ojomo Akintan Estate, Olu FoaM Ilesha/Owo expressway Akure, Ondo State, while the deceased was a driver to a 92-year-old industrialist, in the state, High Chief Ojomo Akintan.
High Chief Akintan, gave out one of the flats in the Estate to Kwakye as a gift for his stewardship and forthrightness.
In a bid to secure, the Estate, Kwakye, engaged the services of the guards who ended up killing him and the daughter
The daughter, Tope, a graduate, was due for her National Youth Service Corps, NYSC, in July 2019 before her life was cut short.
Counsel for the Ondo state government, John Dada, charged the convicts with 5 counts, which include that they robbed Kwakye and killed him and the daughter on May 1, 2019, around 8:30 pm at Ojomo Akintan Estate, Olufoam in Akure.
Dada told the court that the convicts were armed with dangerous weapons and killed their victims with motorcycle cables.
Delivering the judgement, Justice Williams Olamide said the prosecution failed to prove two of the count charges convicts and subsequently discharged and acquitted them.
Olamide, however, said the convicts are guilty of the offence of conspiracy contained and therefore sentenced them to seven years imprisonment.
On the charges that they were found guilty, the judge sentenced them to death by hanging by the neck until they are dead.
Recall that the convicts, when paraded by the police four years ago, confessed that they murdered their employer and daughter under the influence of hard drugs.
Their decomposing bodies were later discovered 16 days after.
This was made possible after the killers were arrested in Kano and Sokoto.
Abubakar said he could not explain what came over them to kill their employer of two years.
“We were just happy that night and we took tramadol and Indian hemp with hot drinks
“We used motorcycle cable to strangle the father and daughter. We took tramadol and Indian hemp that night at about 8 pm and we invited the daughter to come and see who was at the gate.
“ When she came down we used motorcycle cable to strangle her. She shouted and this attracted her father who came running to the scene. We then descended on the father who fell inside the gutter.
“The father was shouting and fell down in the process while calling for help and Ayuba also used his shirt to strangulate him.
“After we made sure that they were both dead, we then hid their corpses under the staircase in the estate.”
They said that they used the night to ransack the entire flat and fled with some belongings of both deceased the following day unnoticed by other neighbours in the estate.
On why they fled to different states after committing the crime, Abubakar said it was “to hide from security operatives after they might have discovered the corpses under the staircase in the flat.
“The father was shouting and fell down in the process while calling for help and Ayuba also used his shirt to strangulate him and we moved their remains under the staircase.”
While Ayuba Idris was arrested in Kano State on 16th May 2019, with the handset of the missing person and his suits, police detectives tracked down Taisu Abubakar, in Sokoto State and one of the victim’s laptop computers and some clothes were recovered from him, on the 28th of May, 2019.
Abubakar had served the deceased for two years while Taisu joined the deceased five months ago after they committed the crime.