9
when Uzoamaka Offer left the flat which was the last time she saw
her alive , she did not see her enter the flat retained by the hospital
on the 3rd floor but assumed that she went there . It is her evidence
also that apart from the key he gave to the defendant to open the
staircase door, other tenants have keys to that entrance door and
she was not present when the entrance door was locked in the
night of the incident. The P.W.3 in his evidence told the Court that
the deceased's purse, text book, exercise book and two Nokia
phones were found in the parlour of her flat while her body was
found at the ground floor with the left leg of the sandal. The P.W.4
Leonard Ezekude in his evidence claimed that he locked the main
gate and entrance door to the building by 1O p.m. as usual and did
not open it for anybody again . But when he came down after
hearing the noise, the gate has been opened with its key. It is his
evidence that every tenant in the compound has his own keys . He
claimed also that when he came down from his flat following the
cry of one of the nurses , the defendant told them that Uzoamaka
Offor fell from the upstairs. However, the P.W.5 in his evidence
stated that following the cry of the nurse on duty, the neighbours
were banging at ·the gate' and later the nurse on duty opened the
gate for them . T~e P.W.6 Emmanuel Elekalachi while being cross
examined by the learned counsel for the defendant testified that
the body of the deceased was not smashed like the body of
someone who fell from a height but blood was gushing out from
the back of her head .
From the totality of the evidence of the prosecution witnesses , one
thing is clear and that is that the defendant who had left the
hospital finally for the day later resurfaced in the hospital.
However, there is no evidence of the time the defendant came
back to the hos'pital and nobody saw him enter the hospital
compound . The fact that the defendant resurfaced in the hospital
suggests that the gate to the compound and the entrance door
had not been locked by the P.W.4 at the time he entered the
hospital. Following the evidence of the P.W.2 and the time of the
incidents she experienced before the corpse of Uzoamaka Offor
was found ; it suggested one of two things. The first is that the
defendant did not ~eave the hospital but was in the flat reserved for
the doctors upstai.rs. If that is the position , it means that it was a
premeditated murder. However, there is no evidence that the
defendant was in possession of the key to the entrance door of the
flat. Since the deceased was the person residing in the flat while
the doctors use the doctors' room in the flat when they could not