Of all the mysteries surrounding the capture of the Lagos “man-eater”, the fate of the missing heads is the most disturbing. Clifford Orji was caught frying up human feet and ribs for breakfast under a city flyover. Severed hands lay about the place.
There was even a policeman’s helmet resting on some bones. But days later the skulls of his uncounted victims are still nowhere to be found.
Joseph Bello stumbled on the cannibal as he walked home after a night vigil at a local church. Bello heard a strange song from bushes next to the flyover and noticed a shack built of car tyres. As he moved closer, the odd smell of cooking flesh hit his nostrils. He peeped into the shack. “When I saw human limbs and other parts roasting on the fire I was transfixed,” he said.
Bello alerted other people around the underpass. A crowd gathered and burst into the shack. They were confronted by severed feet and rib cages, and chunks of flesh.
Orji ran. The crowd gave chase.
No one noticed a small, emaciated woman imprisoned inside the tyres of Orji’s shack. It was only after he was caught and dragged back to watch the mob demolish his home that Awawu Lawal was discovered awaiting her turn on the menu. The sight of the filthy, starving woman drove the crowd wild. They beat her captor until the police arrived. Lawal died several days later after falling into a coma.
The crowd then turned their attention to a man they knew to be Orji’s friend, Tahiru Aliyu. He lived nearby. The mob tore his shack down too, and found a 4m pit underneath where some of the victims were kept before they were killed and cooked.
Orji, who is in his 30s, was sometimes seen wandering naked or chasing complete strangers, ranting at them and waving a stick. Despite his thick matted hair and filthy clothes he managed to convince some people that he was a traditional healer, which may be how he lured his victims.
The cannibal told the police he would entrance women by blowing on their foreheads and they would then follow him back to the underpass. “I will have a sexual affair with her to a state of coma before we slaughter her and roast,” he said. “I am not alone. I have between four and 10 people. They take their own parts and go while I wait for another `meat’.”
Orji’s statement to the police has fueled speculation that he was butchering his victims for more than his own consumption. People in the area said they regularly saw upmarket cars stopping beneath the flyover. To some it explains why none of the victims heads have been found.
In Nigeria there is a discreet trade in body parts for religious or medicinal ceremonies. The case has disturbing echoes of earlier killings when a man called Innocent Ikeanyanwu was discovered with the head of a 10-year-old boy.
In police detention he said he had been regularly shipping severed heads to some highly placed Nigerians for ancient rituals. But before he could name names, Ikeanyanwu died in custody of “cardiac arrest”.
A fortnight after the arrest of Orji and his partner, the flyover has become a tourist site. Lagosians are selling pictures of the human remains on the grills and calendars of the cannibal and his friend. Orji is confined to the Yaba Psychiatric hospital. The police are suspicious of the claim he is insane in part because he told them he was “mad”.
Alleged cannibal Clifford Orji has died in Kirikiri Maximum Prison after being behind bars for 13 years. Clifford Orji died on Friday 17th August 2012. The cause of his death is yet to be known as autopsy is being performed.
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