The peaceful atmosphere of the ancient Remo town of Sagamu was yesterday disrupted when scores of grieving students of the Olabisi Onabanjo University (OOU), Ago-Iwoye stormed the town in search of the morgue containing corpses of their colleagues crushed to death by a container which fell from a moving truck last Friday.
Sunday Mirror gathered that the action of the grieving students was precipitated on their inability to locate the morgue where corpses of their colleagues were being kept.
It was further gathered that the students and some members of staff of their institution which included the Head of Students Affairs, Professor Lekan Arikewuyo, and the Chief
Security Officer (CSO), Rasheed Adekunle, had earlier combed all the private morgues in Sagamu to no avail when they discovered that corpses of their colleagues were not deposited at the morgue of the institution’s Teaching Hospital as earlier claimed by the rescue teams which evacuated the victims.
The enraged students eventually stormed the morgue of Ade Maternity Home, a privately owned hospital where the corpses were kept, forcefully evacuated their dead colleagues without paying a dime and moved them to the morbid anatomy unit of the Olabisi Onabanjo University Teaching Hospital (OOUTH) Sagamu.
The angry students refused to yield to the demand for payment by the hospital before the corpses could be released.
The highly grieved and rampaging students also threatened to deal with the management of the private hospital should it insist on charging the N20, 000 per corpse before their dead colleagues were released to their families.
Policemen in Sagamu also had a hectic time trying to keep the students under control.
When contacted, the man in charge of the morgue of Ade Maternity Home who identified himself as Bayo Fasanya told journalists on the phone that the corpses were those of the students of OOU and had all been taken away.
He noted that calm had return at the hospital but rued that nobody had yet paid him.
He told the reporters that the Sagamu Area Command of the Nigeria Police had said he should let it see the morgue’s service bill when it is ready.
Earlier yesterday, Agboola, an associate professor who also doubles as the chairman of the OOU branch of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) said grieving relatives had initially besieged the OOUTH thinking the victims were kept there.
He added that the head of the Students Affairs and chief security officer of the institution decided to comb private morgues in Sagamu in search of the remains of the student-victims of the accident until they were found at Ade Maternity morgue.
It would be recalled that 12 students of OOU travelling to Lagos State for the weekend were on Friday afternoon crushed to death and one other gravely injured at the Sagamu corridor of Lagos-Ore-Benin expressway when an unlatched 20-feet container from a moving truck came off and fell on the roof of a passenger bus conveying them.
The weighty container press-pinned the bus to the ground killing the passengers in the accident which involved a truck marked (LAGOS) BDG 779 XE and a Toyota Hiace passenger bus bearing (Lagos) XV 311 MUS.
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