By Oyibo Salihu
Gunmen yesterday killed a retired Executive Director with the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria (FRCN), Chief Isa Edime, 67, at Ojikpada Egume village in Dekina local government area of Kogi state.
The same assassins also killed a vigilante leader in the area, Mohammed Wada, the same day.
Kogi state Commissioner of Police, Sa’idu Madawaki, while confirming the incidents, said the killers who entered the town around 9pm, and dragged Edime, a former Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governorship aspirant during the 2003 general elections, to the Egume – Otukpo road and shot him to death.
Madawaki said the deceased had in 2013 reported to the police of a threat to his life, and promised to re-open the case file “so that those behind the killing will be unravelled.”
He said: “The case is still under investigation. I went to the scene and the man had come to report about a case of threat to his life in 2013. I came to know about it today.”
The Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), Kogi state chapter, in a statement, expressed shock over the death of the veteran journalist.
Its chairman, Alhaji Ali Atabor, decried the development, saying that “it goes to show how meaningless human life has become in Nigeria.”
He said the deceased was one of the finest broadcast journalists this country had produced, adding that Edime, during his practising years, exhibited uncommon qualities of diligence, competence, intelligence and true professionalism.
The chairman, who wondered why he was murdered, said “these attributes made him to standard tall in the midst of his colleagues and other practising journalists.”
