INEC Commissioner, His Family Burnt To Death In Kano

Alhaji Abdullahi Minkaila, the Kano state resident electoral commissioner, was on Thursday, April 2, burnt to death with his family.

The dead man was burnt along with his wife and two children in an inferno when his house was engulfed by fire.

The late Minkaila and his family were hurried to the Murtala Mohammed specialist hospital where they died on Friday morning.

Minkaila oversaw last Saturday’s presidential and National Assembly polls in the state.

The cause of the fire is yet to be determined at the time of this report.

A spokesperson of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Mallam Garba, confirmed the incident.

Magaji Majiya, an assistant superintendent of police, said the fire was supposed to have been caused by a spark in the family’s generator set at about 4a.m. Friday morning.

He said the fire later spread to other parts of the house and that the INEC Commissioner and his family tried to escape through the window of one of the toilets in the building but were barricaded by a burglary barrier.

Majiya said the State Police Commissioner, Ibrahim Idris, and the Deputy Police Commissioner in-charge of Criminal Investigation Department, arrived the scene almost on time.

While the police said they are waiting for the result of a postmortem on the remains of Mr. Abdullahi and his family, the spokesman for the Kano state office of INEC, Garba Muhammed, said the bodies of the victims were already being transported to his native Dutse, the Jigawa state capital, for burial, in line with Islamic tradition.

Some neighbours, who rejected to be named in this story for fear they might be harassed by the police, said the fire was strange, and suggested the police should not believe the case an ordinary one.