A hotel in Nyanya area of Abuja, was razed down by fire after a man who checked into the hotel committed suicide in his room, by setting himself ablaze.
The deceased, Dr. Isaac Ojukwu, said to be in his early 60s, committed the said act in the early hours of Thursday.
It was gathered that Dr. Isaac, from Ohuhu in Umuahia area of Abia State,who is married to a German woman with kids, had been staying in the apartment, Boundary Plaza Hotel, Nyanya, for the past 5 years.
Throughout his stay in the hotel, nobody paid him a visit, including his wife and children.
Addressing newsmen who gathered at the burnt hotel, the owner of the hotel, an Associate Professor at the Nasarawa State University, Keffi, Sylvanus M. Itodo (MON), expressed how shocked he was over the incident.
“We were all sitting together that fateful night (Wednesday night) before he left to watch football match and I also left the hotel premises by 11pm, to go and sleep.
“It was around 12am that I recieved a phone call from one of the boys in the hotel, crying, that my hotel was on fire. Before I could get down here, the flame was everywhere; and it took the efforts of the Federal Fire Service to prevent the inferno from escalating to the surrounding houses” he said.
The deceased's neighbour at the hotel, Ohize Yakubu, who has been living in the hotel apartment since his wedding in 2013; alleged that they tried pulling Dr. Isaac out of the building, but he ran back to his burning room.
“We went to watch Arsenal and Bayern match that night, I came back to the hotel and Dr. Isaac came in 5 minutes later. After some minutes, I started hearing strange sound from his room, which is directly opposite my room. He was not shouting loud enough, all I could hear was ‘yeh’, ‘yeh’.
“At first, I was scared to open the door, because I didn’t know if it was a robbery attack, until I heard and recognised the voice of one of our neighbours, beckoning on Dr. Isaac to open the door and come out, shouting fire, fire.
“Then I asked my wife to take my son and rush out of the building while I joined other neighbours and we forced his door open, we met him standing in the sitting room while fire was burning in the bedroom. He was unhurt, we then held his hands and asked him to follow us. All of a sudden, he struggled his way from our hands and ran into the burning room.
“At this point, everyone ran back as the inferno had started escalating and all my belongings got burnt. My wife only escaped with my son. I was engaged in the process of rescuing Dr. Isaac, and lost all my belongings in the process” Yakubu lamented.
Mr. Promise Nkwachukwu Okem, who just arrived Nigeria from Ghana, disclosed that he was able to pick few stuffs from his room before the fire got to his own side.
However, he revealed that two ladies who just finished serving the NYSC and searching for jobs, were not that lucky, as they could not pick anything from their rooms, save for their night gowns. “They could not pick anything from their rooms”, Okem said.
Family members are yet to show up to claim Dr. Ojukwu's body which has been deposited at the Asokoro General Hospital by the Police.
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