At about half past seven on the morning of Sunday, April 9, 2006, a young man was killed in Ibadan, the capital of Oyo State in southwestern Nigeria. His relatives went to the police and named Kazeem Adeyemo. Two hours later, in the Olomi Academy area of the city, officers tried to arrest him. According to the police, he resisted and opened fire, and he was killed in the exchange. He was forty-two.
The next day the Oyo State police spokesman, Femi Adedeji, told the Nigerian Tribune that Adeyemo had been a household name in the killing of innocent people in Ibadan, that more than fifty people had reportedly been killed and several others kidnapped by him, and that he had become a great terrorist. The police had been on his trail, Adedeji said, since April 2005, when he was reported to them for a series of killings, robberies and arson. The Tribune added that the Thursday before his death he was said to have snatched a child from its mother, allegedly for rituals.
Adeyemo had presented himself around the city as a chieftain of the Oodua Peoples Congress, the Yoruba self-determination group whose vigilante wing was then active in the southwest. The Tribune said allegations against him had been reported in its pages through 2005, among them that he had kidnapped a man named Kazeem Alare and nine others in the Orita-Aperin area.
That is the whole of the public record. The figure of fifty was a police statement about deaths that had been reportedly caused by him; no list of the dead was published, no inquest findings were reported, and nobody else was tried for any of it. He was never charged, so none of the allegations was ever put to him or tested before a court. The man killed that Sunday morning was not named in the reports.
What the police said about his death also rests on their own account. The shooting took place within hours of the complaint, in a city where he had apparently been known to police for a year, and no independent inquiry into it was reported. The killings attributed to him may have happened as described; the record that survives cannot show which of them he committed, or how many.