When a man’s body turned up under the Katampe Bridge along the Kubwa Expressway in Abuja on 26 August, public speculation quickly settled on the usual suspects — kidnapping gangs and “one chance” robbers. The Federal Capital Territory Police Command was not so easily satisfied. Investigators followed a different trail entirely, and it led them not to armed criminals on a highway, but to a guest house in Gwarinpa, a married woman, and two hotel workers who made a catastrophic decision.
The thesis here is straightforward: this case demonstrates what methodical, evidence-led policing can achieve when investigators resist the pull of convenient narratives and follow the facts wherever they lead.
The FCT Commissioner of Police, CP Ahmed Sanusi, laid out the sequence of events at a press briefing at the Command headquarters on Saturday, 27 September 2026. The deceased had been reported missing by his family before his body was ever found. That missing persons report, rather than the discovery of the corpse itself, became the engine of the investigation. Police were not reacting to a body; they were looking for a man.
The Phone That Would Not Stay Silent
The decisive clue was the deceased’s missing mobile phone. Sanusi was direct about its importance: “In the course of the investigation, we discovered that the deceased’s mobile phone was missing. This became a significant lead in the investigation, and our operatives commenced efforts to track the device and establish its last known location and usage.” Even though the handset had been switched off — a move that might have seemed clever at the time — investigators were still able to trace its last known communications. Those traces pointed to a woman named Mrs Rukayat Muhammed of Garki Area 2.
What police found when they looked closer was uncomfortable. Muhammed, who is married, had allegedly been in a romantic relationship with the deceased. She had saved his contact on her phone under the name “Safiyat” — a detail that speaks to deliberate concealment. The two had checked into the Good Samaritan Guest House on Second Avenue, Gwarinpa, together. At some point during that stay, Muhammed allegedly found the man unresponsive. Her response was not to call the police or summon medical help. She took his mobile phone and walked out.
That decision set off a chain of events that made a bad situation considerably worse.
Hours after Muhammed left, hotel management could not reach the occupants of the room and forced entry. They found the man’s body. At that point, two hotel employees — Ibrahim Omeiza and Kefat Bitrus — allegedly chose concealment over their legal duty to report the death. According to police, the pair removed the body from the premises, drove it to the Kubwa Expressway and dumped it under the Katampe Bridge, the very location where it was later discovered and initially attributed to highway crime.
Three individuals, three separate failures to do the right thing, and one man whose family was left searching for him while his body lay under a bridge.
Sanusi confirmed that all three suspects — Muhammed, Omeiza and Bitrus — have been linked to the chain of events leading to the discovery. The investigation is ongoing, and the full circumstances of the man’s death, including the cause, remain a matter for the inquiry to establish. What is already clear, however, is that the decision to remove and dump the body transformed what may have been a medical emergency into a criminal matter for everyone involved.
The broader implication is one Nigerian law enforcement would do well to reinforce publicly: digital footprints are increasingly difficult to erase, and a switched-off phone is not an alibi. In this case, it was the thread that unravelled everything.