ABUJA — A 24-year-old civil engineer was shot dead inside his bedroom in the Kubwa area of Abuja in the early hours of Saturday, April 26, 2026, by soldiers from the Presidential Brigade of Guards, his family has alleged, in circumstances the military has so far described only as a case of “mistaken identity” during a robbery response.
Abdulsamad Jamiu, known to friends and family as “Kesh,” was a National Youth Service Corps, NYSC, member, scheduled to pass out in May. He had graduated with a second-class upper degree in civil engineering from the Federal University of Technology, Minna. He was, by his family’s account, planning to enlist in the Nigerian Army through the Direct Short Service Commission, a bitter irony now at the centre of a family’s grief.
His foster father, Engr. MomohSani Jimoh, told Vanguard that he was in Okene, Kogi State, at the time of the incident, having travelled there to bury his own mother and observe the Islamic three-day firdau prayers.
It was in the middle of plans for the firdau prayers that the night swallowed his son. “At 2:04 a.m., my daughter called me. She said ‘Daddy, daddy, the worst has happened.’ I said what happened? She said they have killed Samad. That was what she said, and the phone went off,” Jimoh recounted.
He did not wait for morning. He abandoned the third-day prayers for his mother and hit the road back to Abuja in the dead of night.
Farida Jimoh, the deceased’s sister, was asleep upstairs in her parents’ room when a gunshot woke her. She told Vanguard she had come out of the room and encountered three men in army uniforms in the corridor below.
“They quickly flashed their flashlight in my eye,” she said. “I asked who is here. They said I should calm down, my attention is needed.”
She said the soldiers dragged her outside before she could check her brother’s room, and showed her a section of the perimeter fence where the barbed wire had been bent down, claiming they had trailed an armed robber who jumped in. When she pressed them about her brother’s whereabouts and broke away to enter his room, she found him shot in the head.
“I ran outside and started screaming out of fear and shock. One of the soldiers said I should shut up. He said why am I shouting, it’s very early, do I want the neighbours to wake up,” she said.
When she reached for her phone to call her father in Okene, a soldier took it from her. “He said I should not call anybody,” Farida said. “I was still begging them, pleading with them, my dad has travelled, let me call him, before they gave me back my phone.”
Jimoh said the family’s compound gate was locked when the soldiers arrived, and that the only point of entry they could have used was a section of the fence where barbed wire had been pushed down, a section he showed to journalists during a site visit.
“Our barbed wire was never like that. Who passed through there? The military. That was where they entered, because the gate was locked.
“The only gunshot that the vigilance team confirmed they heard was the only gunshot in my house. There was nothing of such in the area, not even close to me, not even in the entire community.”
He confronted a soldier, who spoke to him over Farida’s phone in the immediate aftermath. “He said, ‘Oga, don’t worry, it was a mistake. It has happened. Calm down.’ This is how he put it.”
When Vanguard visited the family, there were still blood stains in Samad’s room.
What has deepened the family’s outrage is what they said happened after the soldiers removed Abdulsamad’s body. According to both Farida and her father, soldiers instructed local vigilance team members to enter the room and clean the blood off the floor and walls, and to gather what remained of the deceased’s brain matter and bury it outside the compound.
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This detail only came to light, Jimoh said, when a journalist visiting the scene began speaking to the vigilance team members in Hausa. “Since they could not speak English, one of the interviewers that came yesterday was talking to them in a language they understood very well, which is Hausa, and that was how they expatiated on what actually happened, that they were asked by the military men that perpetrated this act to clean up the blood and take the part of the brains that was blown off and bury it here,” he said, pointing to the particular spot.
Farida said soldiers then locked her outside her own home, handed the keys to the vigilance team with instructions not to give it to anyone, and summoned 10 additional soldiers to the scene.
“They came on bikes and stood there. They were snapping (taking pictures) of themselves,” she said.
Farida said she eventually pleaded with the vigilantlve team to return her house keys, and he did so reluctantly and under visible fear.
“He was very scared. I don’t know what they told him,” she said of the local security guard.
Jimoh said military delegations have visited the family every day since the killing. He said one Colonel S. Buhari, representing the Chief of Defence Staff, had led one such visit, during which Jimoh demanded the retraction of a press statement the military had circulated describing the incident as a crossfire during a robbery operation.
“I told them that post is going around and we want it removed or countered because that does not really represent what happened in this area at all. There was no exchange of gunshots from any robbers”, he said.
He said the delegations have assured the family of a thorough investigation and punishment of those responsible. “They said they are not going to hide this — that this time around they are going to do things that will serve as a deterrent to others.”
A police statement was taken from family members and a neighbour. The DPO of the area told Jimoh that officers had been called by the military to remove the body to Kubwa hospital before he personally arrived at the scene.
Abdulsamad’s mother, Habibat Abubakar, who is hypertensive and had been in Okene with her husband for the burial and firdau prayers, was shielded from the full news of her son’s death until she arrived at the compound gate in Abuja. She fainted when the truth reached her.
“Why did they jump my fence? Why did they enter my son’s room? Why did they kill him? Why did they call the vigilance team to come and mop his blood? Why did they instruct them to go and bury my son’s brains?” she demanded before journalists.
“He was a responsible boy. He did not joke with his five daily prayers. He was straightforward. He had a bright future. He had plans for himself, for his siblings, for his mother. And just like that, his dream was cut off right in his room.”
She appealed directly to President Bola Tinubu, his wife, Kogi State Governor Ahmed Ododo and his wife Sefiya, activists, Amnesty International among others to intervene in securing justice for her son.
“This fight is too big for me. This pain is too big for me to bear.”
Abdulsamad Jamiu is survived by his parents, his sister Farida, and younger siblings. He was 24 years old and had since been buried at the Muslim Cemettin Kubwa.
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