Justice For Owo Victims At Last

Three years is a long time to wait for justice. For the families of the 43 worshippers slaughtered inside St Francis Catholic Church in Owo, Ondo State, on that blood-soaked Pentecost Sunday in June 2022, it has felt longer still. The memory of that morning ,the screams, the bodies, the shattered pews has not dimmed. Neither has the grief.

That is why the death sentences handed down recently by Justice Emeka Nwite of the Federal High Court in Abuja to four of the five defendants tried for the attack deserve more than a passing headline. They deserve sustained attention, sober reflection, and the kind of institutional resolve that has been conspicuously absent from Nigeria’s long, tortured judicial experience with terrorism prosecutions.

The facts as established in court are damning in their specificity. Idris Abdulmalik Omeiza, Al-Qasim Idris, Jamiu Abdulmalik and Abdulhaleem Idris all young men, the oldest barely 26 were convicted on multiple terrorism-related counts. Justice Nwite found, beyond reasonable doubt, that the four joined the proscribed Al-Shabaab terrorist group in 2021, held planning meetings at a secondary school in Kogi State, and then proceeded to detonate improvised explosive devices inside a packed church during Sunday worship.

Forty-three persons died instantly. One hundred and sixty-three others were injured. The court sentenced the convicts to death by hanging on the counts relating to the bombings. This newspaper has no quarrel with that outcome. The crime was monstrous. The evidence confessional statements, telecommunications data, eyewitness testimony, 23 exhibits were, in Justice Nwite’s own words, “credible, cogent, positive, verifiable and compelling.” The law was applied. The sentence fits the offence.

We commend the Department of State Services (DSS) for the quality of its prosecution. Eleven witnesses, forensic evidence, mobile phone location data this is what counter-terrorism work should look like when it functions as designed. We commend the Federal High Court for its integrity and for resisting whatever pressures, visible or invisible, that may have attended a trial of this sensitivity. And we commend the accelerated hearing order that was secured at the outset, which helped ensure the case did not dissolve into the procedural limbo that has swallowed so many high-profile prosecutions in this country.

A fifth defendant, Momoh Otuho Abubakar, was discharged and acquitted on the grounds of insufficient evidence. That, too, reflects a court doing its job convicting the guilty, protecting the innocent.

But commendation must be tempered by the wider reckoning that this verdict demands. This conviction is the exception, not the rule. For every terrorism case that reaches a credible conclusion in Nigeria’s courts, there are dozens that stall, collapse, or quietly disappear. Suspects are arrested, displayed at press conferences, and then absorbed into a system too congested, too underfunded, and too susceptible to interference to deliver timely justice.

Boko Haram foot soldiers arrested in the northeast have waited years for arraignment. Bandits caught with weapons in the northwest are released on flimsily worded orders. The families of bomb blast victims in Abuja, Maiduguri, and Kano wait for accountability that does not come.

The Owo verdict is welcome, but it should not be mistaken for a trend.

There is also the question of sponsors. Justice Nwite’s court established that the four convicts were recruited into Al-Shabaab through an individual identified as “Odoba.” The planning meetings were held at a school in Adavi Local Government Area of Kogi State. The logistics were coordinated. Funding had to come from somewhere.

Weapons had to be procured. Yet the prosecution, as presented, focused on the trigger-pullers. The architects, the financiers, the recruiters operating above the cell level are still out there mocking justice and leaving the questions about the untouchability of sponsors of terrorism open. We say plainly: convicting the foot soldiers while the commanders walk free is justice outrageously incomplete.

The DSS and the Attorney-General of the Federation must ensure that the investigation does not end with this verdict. The full network that planned and bankrolled the Owo massacre must be dismantled, not merely pruned.

We have stated on this page, and we restate now, that the war against terrorism in Nigeria will not be won by military means alone. Courts matter. Prosecutions matter. The deterrent effect of a credible legal process one where terrorists know they will be caught, tried, and punished within a reasonable timeframe is as important as any counter-insurgency operation in the field. That is the lesson this verdict carries, and it is one the authorities must institutionalise rather than celebrate as a one-off achievement.

What is needed now is a dedicated counter-terrorism court system with adequate resourcing, protected judges, and a clear prosecutorial framework that moves cases from arrest to verdict without the years-long delays that have become standard. The DSS and its sister agencies need inter-agency collaboration, coordination of structures that actually function, not the turf-war paralysis that has repeatedly compromised national security operations. The government, federal and state must do more to address the conditions of marginalisation, unemployment, and ideological drift that make young men like the four now awaiting execution susceptible to recruitment by terrorist networks in the first place.

Omeiza was 22 when he allegedly joined Al-Shabaab. Al-Qasim Idris was 17. Something failed long before the explosives were detonated.

To the families of Owo’s dead, this verdict will not return a husband, a wife, a child, a parent. No sentence can. But the law has spoken with a clarity it too rarely manages in this country, and that must count for something. The people of Owo deserve to know that the state did not abandon them. Nigeria deserves to know that its courts can still function when pressed to do so. The challenge now is to make that function routine,  to build a justice system where the Owo verdict is not a landmark but simply what happens when terrorism is meticulously prosecuted.