Woman Beats 10-Year -old Girl to Death in Lagos

The police in Lagos State have arrested a middle-aged woman, Linda Alapa, for allegedly beating her 10-year-old housemaid, Joy Mbafan, to death.

Mbafan lived with the suspect on Bolanle Oduniyi Street, Okegbegun, in the Ikorodu area of the state.

It was learnt that Alapa was flogging the girl for a misdemeanor around 3am last Monday when she passed out and died afterwards.

At the Ikorodu General Hospital morgue where she had gone to deposit Mbafan’s corpse, a doctor on duty was said to have noticed marks of violence on the body and alerted the police at the Sagamu Road Division.

A police source said that after interrogation, Alapa confessed to beating the girl, adding that she would be charged with murder.

A neighbour of the suspect said Alapa did not only beat the girl but also starved her of food.

The woman, who gave her name only as Ellen, said although she did not know what led to the beating on that day, “she usually beat the girl for messing up their apartment.”

“Around 3am on the day the girl died, I heard her crying as the woman (Alapa) flogged her. I woke up my husband to intervene. He said he was tired of the woman’s insults. After a while, she stopped crying.

“It was when I came back from work that afternoon that I saw a crowd on our premises in tears. They said Joy (Mbafan) was dead. The woman’s husband was not at home that day. It was the landlord that told him about the incident on the telephone.”