Habiba Abubakar, mother of NYSC member, Abdulsamad Jamiu who was allegedly killed by troops at his home in Dei-Dei, Abuja, has narrated how she learnt of her son’s death in heartbreaking details.
She spoke of a night of frantic calls, of missing phones, of family too terrified to tell her the truth.
Abubakar, who spoke in an interview with The Cable yesterday, said she was on a trip for a funeral ritual with her husband when a call from a neighbour warned her that something was awry in her neighbourhood.
I went on Thursday wanting to go back on Saturday to meet my son at home. Only for my next neighbour to call me At approximately 2:30. I said, ‘hi’. ‘Hope there is no problem?’ she said. She says she hears gunfire. ‘Fear shot through me,’ she claimed.
She stated she immediately contacted her first son but his line was switched off. Her daughter’s phone was busy.
When she finally saw her spouse, he was evasive.
At first he would not give me the real story. “Soldier carried Abdulsamad,” he claimed. Abdulsamad, soldier? I said. How? Why? “They want to go and question him,” she said. “He said no.
She cried as her phone was taken from her, she did not know by whom and when she begged for it back, her family replied they could not find it, Abubakar added.
‘That was the time I knew my son is not alive again,’ she claimed.
She stated she kept after her daughter Farida for the truth but her daughter continued telling her to calm down because of her blood pressure.
“I was going to Abuja, only to discover that my son was dead,” she claimed.
Abubakar said she was told the troops climbed over the fence of her complex instead of entering through the gate, passed through the back exit door and went straight to Abdulsamad’s room.
They shot him through the door. They fired the door twice,” she added.
Soldiers had requested vigilante members in the vicinity to clean up the blood after the death and told them to get a pail and detergent from her kitchen, she said.
“They came into my kitchen, took Klin, took from there the bucket and gave the vigilante to mop the blood. ‘What happened? Why would they?’ she asked.
Habiba cried through the interview. Her son was in his room when the military came, not in the compound, nor in the parlour.
“Who did he offend? I want to find out. “Who did you offend?” she continued, her sadness oscillating between agony and naked rage.
Abdulsamad, 24, was shot dead at his family house in Dei-Dei Shagari Quarters in the early hours of April 25, when his parents were not there. At that moment his sister was in the house.
The Headquarters Guards Brigade of the Nigerian Army had said Jamiu was caught up in gunfire when troops reacted to a distress call about armed bandits.
Brigade spokesman Odunola Olawuyi said troops were fired at by fleeing suspects and the killing occurred “in the course of the engagement.”
The family made a formal statement Wednesday in which it described the military’s version of events as “false, misleading and a slap in the face to the memory of an innocent young man.”
The family said the bullet’s trajectory indicated the shot was fired from outside the room, through a closed door, “not consistent with a firefight.”
“No weapons were recovered, no armed adversary was identified and witnesses heard just one single gunshot throughout the night: the one fired inside the Jamiu residence,” it said.
The family also said soldiers at the site stated in front of a Divisional Police Officer that they made a mistake.
“The soldiers confessed that they killed Abdulsamad Jamiu by mistake. “They confessed that they killed an innocent person,” the statement added.
The family seeks an impartial investigation, the suspension and prosecution of those guilty, a retraction of the army’s statement and a written apology.
“The Nigerian Military is constitutionally empowered to protect Nigerian citizens. “On the night of 25 April 2026, that mandate was catastrophically and fatally violated,” the statement read.
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