The “Aluu 4” killing was a necklace lynching involving four (4) young men from the University of Port Harcourt, namely Ugonna Obuzor, Toku Lloyd, Chiadika Biringa, and Tekena Elkanah.

On the 5th day of October, 2012, the 4 boys were killed after being wrongly accused of theft in Aluu, a community in the Obio/Akpor local government area of Rivers State, Nigeria.

Chiadika Biringa, Lloyd Toku Mike, Favour Erikena, and Ugonna Obuzor were all friends and University of Port Harcourt students. They were all first sons of their parents. The four students were occasional roommates. Ugonna sometimes spent the night with Favour who lived outside the campus because his residence on campus was broken into multiple times.

According to sources, Ugonna had a debtor named Bright who owed him an undisclosed sum of money, and this concerned him greatly because Bright was avoiding him.

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However, Ugonna was able to track down Bright’s exact location over time. He thereafter sought the help of his cousin Lloyd, childhood and longtime friend Favour and roommate Chiadika. Together, four of them went looking for Bright.

The four students arrived at the debtor’s house at midnight, an unusual hour for anyone to be moving around, armed with an axe, a pen knife, and a Cutlass in order to scare the debtor. In the process of settling the loan, a misunderstanding arose, which quickly escalated into a dispute.

The debtor’s neighbor heard the ruckus and screamed, claiming the 4 men were coming to steal laptops and cell phones.

The noise attracted Aluu vigilante group, and while on their way to the scene of the chaos, the people concluded that the students were the thieves that had been terrorizing the community.

On hearing this, an angry mob began chasing the four boys through the streets with sticks and stones, caught them, stripped them naked, beat and tormented them until they were almost unconscious, before the Aluu Vigilante squad arrived.

Afterwards, in the presence of a crowd, the Nigerian police officers and the community’s people, they were dragged through mud, had concrete slabs dropped on their heads and car tires filled with petrol wrapped around their necks in order to burn them. Nobody could stop it, not even the Nigerian police force.

Favour’s sister happened to be nearby when she learned that her brother was about to be killed via “jungle justice.” She attempted to intercede and save him and his friends by yelling at the top of her voice and reaffirming their innocence, but she was overwhelmed by the crowd’s magnitude.

The angry crowd then warned her to get out of there, so she decided to contact other family members and the police in a last-ditch effort to save her brother’s life, but the men had been dead by the time the appropriate assistance was sought. The killings were recorded on a cellphone and then uploaded to the internet.

The video, which shows them lying on the ground “necklaced,” being beaten repeatedly, and finally being set on fire, went viral, with the majority of viewers criticizing the crime against humanity.

Condolences from all over Nigeria were sent to the victims’ families.

The Nigerian Senate also criticized the jungle justice practiced by members of the community, in which four students were killed without trial in front of a large crowd.

Students of the university of Port Harcourt protested the lynchings and went on rampage, rioting and destroying properties in the community where the students were killed.

The lynching was widely broadcasted in Nigeria and around the world. The crime also highlighted the pervasiveness of “jungle justice” or “mob justice” in Nigeria.

In the case of “Aluu 4,” which is 10-years ago today, several persons were arrested as a result of the crime.

On July 31, 2017, four years and nine months after the heinous crime was committed, the Rivers State High Court in Port Harcourt sentenced a Police Sergeant, Mr. Lucky Orji, David Chinasa Ogbada, and Ikechukwu Louis Amadi (aka Kapoon) to death for their active participation in the killing of the four University of Port Harcourt students.