By Ola ‘Kiya, Reporting
A 28-year-old father, Amechi Ogo, has bagged life imprisonment for raping his own four-year-old daughter.
Ogo was sentenced by the Delta State High Court sitting in Asaba and presided over by Honourable Justice Flora Ngozi Azinge, on Wednesday February 1, 2023.
Stonix News reports that the defendant was arraigned before the High Court on a charge of forcefully having an unlawful carnal knowledge of his child in Asaba on May 31, 2018, contrary to Section 218 of the Criminal Code Law of Delta State.
The prosecution, led by the Director of Sexual Offences Unit, Ministry of Justice, Mrs P.U. Akamagwuna, had told the Court that the Defendant returned home on the fateful day and demanded sex from his wife.
When his wife turned him down and left the house on an errand, the sex-starved man forced himself on his four-year-old daughter.
He was, however, caught in the act by a neighbour and fled the scene.
Ogo was subsequently arrested by the police during which he made a confessional statement which was tendered in court.
During his trial, the Defendant retracted the confessional statement and denied ever committing the offence.
Delivering her judgement,Justice Azinge held that the evidence of the daughter and the witness who caught him in the act, together with the Defendant’s own confessional statement, proved beyond reasonable doubt that he committed the offence.
Justice Azinge held that the defence raised in the confessional statement of the Defendant, to the effect that he lost all sense of reasoning after a native doctor laid hands on him and directed him to have sex with any woman he saw, was untenable and an afterthought.
She described the defendant as a paedophile, whose conduct in raping his own girl child was callous, animalistic, barbaric and against the laws of God.
She stated that the society needed to be protected from persons like the Defendant who prey on children.
The court, thereafter, sentenced the Defendant to life imprisonment.
Speaking to newsman after the judgement, Mrs P.U. Akamagwuna, said that the State Ministry of Justice will continue to aggressively prosecute all sex-related offenders in line with the ministry’s zero tolerance policy for such heinous crimes.
It will be recalled that the Sexual Offences Unit of the Ministry of Justice had, previously, recorded three judgements in sex-related offence cases in this current legal year.
The convict has, since, been registered in the Delta State Sex Offenders Register and his details uploaded to the national database.
