The Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) has condemned the reported rape and gruesome murder of a 100 level Microbiology student of University of Benin, Miss Vera Uwaila Omozuwa, by unknown persons, in a church in Benin City, the Edo state capital.

While expressing deep shock over the incident, the rights group described it as a violent violation and termination of a dream, sacrilegious and totally unacceptable adding that those who murdered the innocent teenage student who went to carry out private studies in the quietness and holiness of the church are agents of Satan and bloody murderers and persons bent on bringing the name of the Body of Christ into disrepute.

“They have committed the most egregious and most senseless profanity that is unprecedented in historical context and monumental in terms of the sheer quantum of what their attempts to damage the brand of the church represents broadly, which is a place that righteousness, peace and human progress are preached.

“These killers who ended the precious and sacred life of this girl are primitive, satanic, brutish and rapacious. They have committed multiple offences against the Body of Christ and violated the sanctity of the life of this teenage student and their deprivation of her life is murderous and has deprived her of her constitutionally guaranteed fundamental right to life as provided for in section 33(1) of the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria,” HURIWA said Sunday in a statement.

In the statement signed by its National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, and the National Media Affairs Director, Miss Zainab Yusuf, the rights group said they are discomfited and disappointed in the disruptive statement of the University of Benin authorities, which sought to cast damaging innuendos of impropriety on the incident by blaming the victims of violence instead of the perpetrators.

“We think that the reaction of the University of Benin is not far reaching enough but is timid, tendentious, ambiguous and was done in bad faith. The University of Benin through their reaction tried to cast a blame that the victim of this deadly rape and insensitive gruesome attacks may have brought the misfortune to herself by the company she kept.

“This pedestrian argument, without the faintest empirical evidence, is irresponsible and irrational and has therefore exposed the signatory of that public statement by the authority of the University of insensitivity. Is the University saying then that it has knowledge of those who carried out this dastardly act of murder and sexual violation of the most depraved dimension? Why say the students should be careful of the company they keep as if the authority has information not available to the public about the identity of her killers or what?

“That mumbo jumbo of a media statement by the University of Benin is absolutely absurd and ridiculous,” HURIWA said.

It called on the Inspector General of Police, Mohammed Adamu, to immediately constitute a team of investigators and speedily bring the perpetrators to book.

It also appealed with the General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Pastor Enoch Adeboye, who is one of the few credible fathers of organised religions in Nigeria to mount pressure on his friend, President Muhammadu Buhari, to task the IGP to arrest, prosecute and punish heavily these senseless killers of this young girl in a scene that is similar to the movie called Murder in the Cathedral.

These killers who committed this murder and raped the victim inside a church of God, HURIWA said, must be immediately arrested.

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