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Two Nigeria Customs Service officers were arrested on Sunday and taken into police custody after shooting a motorist dead on the Osogbo-Iwo Road in Osun State, in an incident that drew immediate public outrage, prompted a crowd to gather at the scene, and triggered a formal police investigation ordered by the state’s Commissioner of Police.
The Osun State Police Command identified the suspects as Kolawole Suuti and Danjuma Samuel, both NCS operatives who were reportedly in plain clothes at the time of the incident. According to the police statement issued by spokesperson DSP Abiodun Ojelabi, the two officers were chasing suspected tokunbo, foreign-used, vehicles along the road when the shooting occurred.
“The driver of the said ash-coloured Toyota Corolla, one of the vehicles being chased by the Customs, was shot and confirmed dead by a medical doctor at the Osun State University Teaching Hospital,” the statement read. The body of the yet-to-be-identified victim was deposited at the teaching hospital’s morgue pending identification and autopsy.
The incident occurred at the Onibueja area in Ido-Osun, near a police roadblock on the road that connects Osogbo and Iwo, at approximately 10 a.m. A resident of the area who identified himself only as Sunday described the sequence of events to reporters.
“The man was driving towards the Osogbo end from the Iwo end of the road when some security operatives in mufti shot at his vehicle. He died right there behind the wheel. The car was riddled with bullets and people rushed to the scene,” he said. Video footage from the scene, obtained by The Punch, showed the victim’s ash-coloured Toyota Corolla with visible bullet holes across its body, surrounded by residents who had gathered in evident anger at the killing.
Police officers who responded to the distress report arrested both suspects at or near the scene. Several items were recovered during the operation, including a Beretta pistol with breech number 125024, eleven rounds of 9mm live ammunition, one expanded 9mm shell, consistent with a spent round discharged during the incident, and two Toyota Corolla vehicles: a white one bearing Lagos registration number AAA 400 GQ, and the ash-coloured vehicle driven by the deceased, bearing registration number GFQ 0982. The recovered spent casing is likely to form a central element of the ballistic component of the investigation.
Commissioner of Police Ibrahim Gotan ordered a “thorough investigation to ascertain the circumstances surrounding the incident,” the command’s statement said. The command added that “anyone found culpable would face the full wrath of the law” and urged members of the public to remain calm and cooperate with investigators. Gotan has not made a personal public statement on the case.
The Nigeria Customs Service did not issue a statement on the shooting or the arrest of its personnel by Sunday evening. The NCS’s public affairs department did not respond to media enquiries. The specific authority under which the two officers were operating their anti-tokunbo operation in plain clothes on a public highway — without uniformed identification and apparently without coordination with the uniformed police roadblock nearby — has not been clarified by either the Customs Service or the police.
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Sunday’s killing in Osogbo is the latest in a documented series of incidents in which Nigerian security agencies have used lethal force in circumstances that have prompted public outrage and formal investigations. The pattern has been particularly visible in the context of road enforcement operations, where the combination of plain-clothes deployment, moving vehicle pursuits, and the absence of effective oversight has repeatedly produced fatal encounters between security operatives and civilian motorists. In Osogbo itself, the killing of a truck driver by a police officer who subsequently fled the scene in December 2021 — an officer who struck the driver with a shovel before shooting him in the chest — produced a similar public response and a similarly inconclusive investigation outcome.
The Nigeria Customs Service has broad powers to intercept, stop, and pursue vehicles suspected of carrying smuggled goods including foreign-used vehicles imported through unofficial channels. Tokunbo vehicles — most commonly those diverted from authorised ports of entry or brought in through land borders without full duty payment — represent a significant portion of the vehicles targeted by Customs enforcement operations across southwest Nigeria. However, the agency’s use of those powers, particularly in plain-clothes operations on public roads, has generated sustained criticism from road users, transport unions, and human rights organisations, who argue that the absence of standardised protocols for vehicle stops and pursuits creates conditions in which lethal errors and deliberate misconduct are both more likely and less accountable.
Read Also: Nigeria Customs Officer Killed In Ogun Smuggling Ambush
The National Union of Road Transport Workers and several commercial driver associations in Osun State have in recent months raised formal complaints about the frequency of harassment, extortion, and aggressive vehicle interceptions by security personnel — both uniformed and plain-clothes — on major roads in and around Osogbo. Drivers at a protest at the Osun State Secretariat last week specifically cited harassment by uniformed operatives as a factor making their work unsustainable.
No charges had been formally filed against Suuti and Samuel as of Sunday evening. The police statement confirmed they remained in custody. The deceased driver’s identity had not been confirmed, with the command appealing to members of the public with information to contact the nearest police station or the Osun State Command directly. The coroner’s inquest that would normally precede any formal charge relating to a death in police custody or arising from a security operation has not been publicly scheduled.
