Photo of one of the victims of the trailer accident in Ojuelegba

Pictured above is 48 year old Abubakar Sulaiman, a married man of 5 children who was killed after a trailer and it's container fell from Ojuelegba bridge on Wednesday September 2nd. Abubakar who is into bureau de change business at the local wing of the Murtala Mohammed International Airport, Ikeja, Lagos, was out with two of his colleagues, Kamilu and Umar when the trailer fell and landed on the SUV they were driving in. They all died instantly. Abubakar's wife of 15 years, Zainab who spoke to Punch narrated how she got the news of her husband's death..

 

"I started having a strange feeling from afternoon of that day after calling his mobile phone several times without a response from him,” Abubakar’s wife, Zainab, told our correspondent in their Agege Lagos home on Friday. “I became restless; my thoughts were on him all the time,” she continued. “So, I called one of his friends later that evening to find out if they were together. The friend told me that they were not together and that he had gone out with another of his friends. By the time I called that one too he was not picking so I called one of my brother-in-laws to know if he had heard from my husband. Not satisfied, I started calling the number of his driver, Kamilu. Later a policeman picked the call and asked who I was, I told him and he said I should tell my husband to call the number and speak with them. I told him that my husband was with the driver I wanted to speak with and immediately they cut the call. When I called back they told me to tell an adult male in the family to call the number so they could speak. By the time the news was eventually broken to me, I fainted. I don’t know how I survived those moments. Three days without Abubakar has left the once happy home in a shadow of its old self. He promised to have us celebrate our 16-year wedding anniversary on October 24. We were both looking forward to that special day. But death has ended that dream. The children cry every night, asking after their father. Words cannot tell the vacuum we feel in our hearts. Life can never be the same without him,” she said

Brother of the deceased, Usman, says the family is saddened by Abubakar's death because they are still mourning the death of the last born of their family who died last year in a road accident when this one now happened.

"I was out of the house for most part of the day and didn’t return home until night that Wednesday,” he began. “While I was in bathroom, calls kept coming on my phones; I thought they were business calls which I could pick later because I was very tired at that point. But after praying, I decided to check my phone and later called one of my relatives who immediately asked if I had heard what happened. The person said my brother was involved in an accident. By the time we rushed down to Ojuelegba, another person called us that we shouldn’t go to the Surulere police station where the matter was being handled but that we should to the Mainland Hospital in Yaba. On getting there, they took us straight to their mortuary, that was when we actually knew that they were dead. There was no way I could relay such message to our mother. We had to keep the news away from his wife and our mother because the two of them are hypertensive; such news would break them down. The news was broken to them the next morning. We had to call our elderly Hausa women to break the news to them and stay with them. Our mother cried uncontrollably at the news because Mukthar’s death, our last born, is still fresh in our minds. The three of them in the vehicle at the time of the accident, were heading back home from Apapa where they had gone to transact a business. One of them, Kamilu, used to live here at the family house before getting an apartment of his own recently. He had four children while Umar, the third person in the car with them, has eight children. We are all related,” he said.

Source/photo credit: Punch