Jamiu Abiola, son of the late business mogul and winner of the June 12, 1993, presidential election, Moshood Abiola, fondly called MKO, has said that the autopsy conducted on the corpse of his father “did not state poison as the cause of his death”.
POLITICS NIGERIA reports that so many people hold the notion that Abiola was poisoned in prison in 1998. Although Jamiu is not completely ruling out that possibility, ‘being that there are different types of poisons’, he believed the government of Abdulsalami Abubakar may be culpable in his father’s death..
Jamiu was reacting to a recent comment from Abubakar who said Abiola was not killed but that he died after falling ill in detention.
“It is like a final act in a play like the death of Julius Caesar. When we speak of the death of a political opponent, the government can be liable in two ways,” Vanguard quotes Jamiu as saying.
“The person may be killed directly like in the case of my mother who, as you know, was shot by Sergeant Rogers acting on behalf of the then military government.
“Or the person may be killed indirectly by allowing him to die as in the case of my father.
“Trying to pin down my father’s death on poison would be a waste of time since there was an autopsy report and it did not state poison as the cause of his death even though that might still be possible as far as I am concerned, depending on the type of poison.
Conceding that Abiola had a heart problem, Jamiu said: “But my father did have heart problems and General Abdulsalami knew that.
“The general public knew too. Even those who saw him the night before his death said he was not well, so why was he not given proper medical attention?”
