From: Rose Ejembi, Makurdi
Convicted Air Craft Man (ACM) Bernard Kalu had told the General Court Marshal set up to try his case that he suspected that his estranged girlfriend, Air Craft Woman (ACW) Oladipupo Sholape was having a love relationship with another man.
Kalu had in March this year shot and killed his estranged lover at her residence at the Nigerian Air Force Base in Makurdi, the Benue State capital.
Reading out the findings of the court shortly after Kalu was handed down a death sentence, Judge Advocate of the Court, Flight Lieutenant MA Umoh said when Kalu was taken into the witness box, he said he agreed that Sholape was his lover whom she had promised to propose marriage to in the presence of his mother.
He added that when his mother eventually came, he only introduced her as a lover but didn’t propose to her as promised because his mother had, the night before counseled him to face his study and prepare for his JAMB and NDA examinations rather than thinking about marriage at that age.
Kalu told the court that shortly after that period, he started noticing some kind of withdrawal from the relationship on the side of Sholape and during which he apologised and they got back together again.
He intimated that during her birthday last February, they had an issue over his failure to buy her a birthday present but that that too was quickly resolved.
However, he said on March 11, he went to Compound 9, Corporal and Below Quarters where Sholape had just gotten an accommodation and she introduced him to a young man, Samuel Echo as her boyfriend but that he was not comfortable with the young man because he suspected that he was having a love affair with Sholape.
He said that prompted him to quickly pick Sholape’s phone and scrolled through while they were alone and she was preparing food for him and that he was shocked to see some questionable chats as well as an unused condom by the side of the bed.
Kalu said as soon as Sholape appeared from the kitchen and saw him with the phone, she got angry and asked why he was going through her phone without her knowledge adding that when she asked her whether the young man who occupied the house was going to use the condom on her, she said, “now you know, so what else.”
He said that statement so angered him that he started having headache and he went back to his house to sleep but couldn’t sleep or do anything stressing that the next time, he saw himself putting on his camouflage uniform at his friend’s place and then he saw himself in the guardroom.
The convict said when he later came to himself, he asked why he was in the guardroom, he was shocked when somebody told him he had killed his girlfriend.
Asked during cross examination if he killed his girlfriend, Kalu said he did not kill her.
President of the court, Gp. Capt. Elisha Bindul found him guilty in six out of the eight-count charges proffered against him and sentenced him to death by hanging subject to the confirmation of the judgement by the conveying authority.