The badly burnt corpses of two suspected robbers were left overnight on a street in the most upmarket district of Nigeria’s commercial hub Lagos after they were lynched by a mob, witnesses said Saturday.
A reporter saw the bodies in the Victoria Island commercial district, a stone’s throw from the city’s best known hotel on a road lined with banks, shops and bars that are popular with expatriates and the local business elite.
Local people said that the men had been suspected of stealing bikes from “Okada drivers”, the city’s ubiquitous motorcycle taxi riders, and had been caught and killed by a vigilante mob.
Police spokespeople were not immediately available for comment, but both civilian vigilante justice and extrajudicial killings by security forces are common in Nigeria, where few have faith in the criminal justice system – Sapa-AFP