Pastor arrested for using wife for rituals

The police, acting on the petition, reportedly arrested Amayo who is said to be a senior pastor of a Pentecostal church in Uromi town, Esan North-East Local Government Area of the state, alongside three other pastors of the church.

It was gathered that the family of the deceased had petitioned the Zone 5 Police Headquarters in Benin, the state capital, where it alleged questionable circumstances surrounding the death of their daughter in what Pastor Amayo said occurred in a ghastly car accident but could not show them the cars involved in the accident, raising doubts over the true position of the incident.

Confirming the arrest of Amayo, the Zonal Public Relations Officer (ZPRO), DSP Emeka Iheanacho, said the discrepancies in the report made to the police on the death of Faith, a 38-year-old woman, necessitated the arrest and investigations.

According to reports, Pastor Amayo had reported a case of motor accident in which he alleged that he lost his wife, at the Ekpoma Police Division while the family of the deceased wrote a petition to the Assistant Inspector-General of Police in the zone, alleging murder.

“The matter was reported at the Edo State Command where initially, they were investigating a fatal motor accident, before the family of the late woman, Faith Amayo, initiated a petition to the office of the Assistant Inspector-General of Police alleging foul play.

So the petition before AIG is from the family of the deceased where they suspected that the husband must have used the woman for ritual. So, that is the matter we are investigating presently.

Officials of the Zone 5 Police Headquarters arrested Amayo and three other pastor of his church who will not be named until investigations are complete.

The investigating team will unravel the circumstances of the woman’s death,”

the ZPRO said in a statement.

“On Tuesday, July 26, 2016, Pastor Kingsley Amayo had, through his elder brother, one Chief Iso, informed the family that their daughter, Mrs Faith Amayo, had died in a motor accident at Ujogba, while her husband was driving her to Benin City.

We had to instruct our lawyer to initiate a petition when Amayo gave conflicting accounts of how our sister, his wife, died in an accident he was also involved in.

Our findings revealed that no case of accident was recorded at Ujogba nor reported at Ekpoma Police Division in charge of the area that fateful day.

There was no report of the other vehicle which was allegedly involved in the head-on collision with Pastor Amayo’s Sienna car.

Who rescued them and the hospital where my sister was pronounced dead, who embalmed her corpse before she was taken to mortuary in Uromi?

Why was it not reported to the police or why did they not wait for her family members to see her?” Engineer Evbuomwan insisted.

A brother of the victim, Engineer Fidelis Evbuomwan, also narrated that the family became worried with the secrecy Pastor Amayo went about in the sad development, citing that the deceased who was yet to have a child, was properly married to Pastor Kingsley Amayo in 2011.