Dr. Fabunmi was said to have promptly forwarded the mail to the University for ‘Full Investigation’. During preliminary investigation, she confessed that it was not true that Dr. Fabunmi harassed her sexually. Eventually she had to apologize to Dr. Fabunmi (via another email) for blackmailing him.
Due to his recalcitrant, a new trick was employed by recruiting one of his research project supervisees that adjudged to be “close” to him. One of them who eventually agreed, we were told, lured Dr. Fabunmi to a private residential house in Ibadan, where he was abducted by some students who claimed that they were cultists recruited to do the dirty job by some of his colleagues with a view to stopping his promotion.
Several other attempts had been made against this lecturer. However, Dr. Fabunmi did not fall into any of the traps, hence a violent dimension had to be introduced in the case of the four students who attacked and robbed Dr. Fabunmi in July 2008. Their assignment was to set him up in sexual harassment plot. However, the project was mismanaged as he was lured to a private residential house where he was allegedly abducted at gun point, molested sexually and robbed. He was given severe instruction not to tell or report to anyone.
The armed hoodlums that were hired for the job ended up robbing Dr. Fabunmi when he was lured to a private residential house near where he had parked his car on 14th. July, 2008. He was molested and stripped naked so as to make it look as if he had harassed the female student sexually. Both the attackers and the professor allegedly cautioned him not to report or tell anybody about the attack.
However, Dr. Fabunmi reported to both the Nigerian Police and the university security service immediately and refused to pay a ransom of N50,000.00 to the bank account of one Kolawole Adesina in Oceanic Bank (Acct No. 088000101771021), latest on Wednesday 16th July,2008. Dr. Fabunmi was instructed to inform Kolawole of the payment through GSM Number 08029223138. The attackers were able to evade police arrest for two weeks. The university security services were however able to arrest and hand them over to police.
All the attackers turned out to be students. The students and their parents, we further gathered, have since written letters of apology to Dr. Fabunmi, who is insisting that justice must be done. The attackers confessed that they held meetings with the said professor before and after the attack. This case is still under police investigation.
But, while Dr. Fabunmi was away to London for a two-year LLB Law degree programme, some of his colleagues developed their own version of the case. Searches confirmed that his absence delayed police prosecution of the matter, but he is back to Nigeria now and he is insisting that the case should be charged to court in spite of all forms of harassments and intimidation to stop him from going to court.
While all these were going on and in the course of our investigation, we gathered that the university authority which investigated the matter inintialy and indicted the students who framed up Dr. Fabunmi had made a U-turn and defferred decision on the four students’ (Thelma Uzoma Adoseh, Kolawole Adesina, Peter Ogere and Femi Adesina) whose verdict was “gross misconduct”.
The university graduated them, even though the Nigeria Police notified the university of their involvement in armed robbery. However, nothing was done to the influential professor and the other staffs who allegedly used these students against Dr. Fabunmi. Grapevine information suggests that the professor wants to rush the processing of his retirement as he was not sure of his fate. He was seen playing significant roles in the selection of nominees for the search team that would select candidates for the position of the Vice Chancellor that would soon be vacant, with the view that the next Vice Chancellor would be cover up his excesses.
