A Delta State High Court sitting at Asaba has sentenced a 28-year-old father, Amechi Ogo, to life imprisonment for raping his four-year-old daughter.
Presiding Judge, Justice Flora Azinge, held that the testimony of the victim, the witness who caught the father of the little girl in the act, and confessional evidence of the defendant proved beyond reasonable doubt that he committed the act.
The state arraigned the defendant before the High Court on a charge of rape for having unlawful carnal of his child at Asaba on May 31, 2018, contrary to Section 218 of the Criminal Code Law of Delta State.
The prosecution, led by the Director of Sexual Offences Unit, Ministry of Justice, Mrs Patricia Akamagwuna, told the court that the defendant came home on a fateful day and demanded sex from his wife.
When his wife turned him down and left the house on an errand, the defendant forced himself on his four-year-old daughter.
A neighbour caught him in the act and he bolted away from the scene.
The police subsequently arrested him and he made a confessional statement, which was tendered in court.
In his trial, the defendant retracted the confessional statement and denied committing the offence.
Delivering judgement, Honourable Justice Azinge held that the defence raised in the confessional statement of the defendant, to the effect that he lost all sense of reasoning after a native doctor laid hands on him, and directed him to have sex with any woman he saw, was untenable and an afterthought.
He described the defendant as a paedophile, whose conduct in raping his own four-year-old child was callous, animalistic, barbaric and against the laws of God.
She stated that society needed to be protected from persons like the defendant, who prey on children.
Speaking to reporters after the judgment, Mrs Akamagwuna said that the state Ministry of Justice would continue to aggressively prosecute all sex-related offenders in line with the ministry’s zero-tolerance policy to such heinous crimes.
The Sexual Offences Unit of the Ministry of Justice had previously recorded three judgements in sex -related offences cases in this current legal year.
The convict has since been registered in the Delta State sex offenders register and his details uploaded to the national database.
