By 
By Zoka Oruame and Oluwaseun Ajayi
Miss Oluwabamise (Bamise) Ayanwola , victim of kidnap and murder in a Lagos government-owned bus (BRT), is gone; murdered and probably raped (result of medical autopsy is still being awaited) but she leveraged technology, her mobile phone, to leave evidences strong enough to expose those final moments before her life was extinguished.
Authorities are now sifting through the details, thanks to her digital enablement.
Fact: Nice (Andrew) Omininikoron, the driver of the Bus Rapid Transit vehicle arrested in connection with the brutal murder of passenger Oluwabamise Ayanwola, may never have been arrested if there were no video evidences linking his bus to Miss Ayankole.
In a mobile video conversation, the victim related the final moments to a friend helping to leave a trail of actualities, revealing her worrisome observations inside the bus, her fears and anxieties sufficient enough to expose details that appear to now confound her killer(s). It was obvious the killer(s) did not realise citizen Ayanwola was recording those final moments.
It will not be the first time technology will expose crime. Ben Lovejoy, a British technology writer and EU Editor for 9to5Mac, writes on how technology exposed murder in Greece in a case that authorities would never have been able to unravel without the digital evidence that pointed to the victim’s husband as the culprit.
Smartphone and smartwatch data provided crucial evidence that led yesterday to a man confessing to murdering his wife. The data showed that his story about what happened could not have been true…
Greek helicopter pilot Babis Anagnostopoulos originally claimed that his wife was killed by robbers during a home invasion. However, data from his own phone, his wife’s smartwatch and their home surveillance system all contradicted his version of events
BBC News reports:
A 33-year-old pilot has confessed to the killing of his young British wife, Caroline Crouch, police say, in a crime that shocked Greece. Anagnostopoulos originally claimed three robbers had broken into the couple’s Athens home and tied him up. But after a lengthy investigation, police said his story did not add up.
Then they checked a range of technical devices to corroborate his account. Caroline Crouch’s biometric watch revealed her pulse readings on the day she died. Babis Anagnostopoulos’s movements were also tracked via his mobile phone, and the couple’s surveillance system also highlighted discrepancies […]
Caroline Crouch’s smart watch showed that her heart was still beating at the time her husband claimed she was murdered. The activity tracker on his phone showed him moving around the house while he said he was tied up; and the recorded time at which data cards were removed from the home security camera also told a different story to his version of events […]
Detectives approached him after the memorial service on Alonnisos on Thursday, asking him to go with them to Athens, saying there had been a breakthrough in the inquiry and they wanted to identify a suspect. It was only when he arrived in the capital he was told that he was the suspect.
He confessed after eight hours of questioning, they said.
It’s not the first time that data from a smartphone has helped to solve a crime. iPhone data also proved crucial in a very similar case in 2018, when a man again claimed that his wife had been killed by intruders.
A pharmacist in the UK murdered his wife, then tried to make it look like intruders had broken into the home and carried out the killing […] but activity data from the iPhones of both murderer and victim showed what really happened.
Patel’s deception was uncovered after police examined the iPhone health app, which tracks the user’s steps throughout the day, on his and his wife’s phones.
In the minutes that followed Jessica’s death, Patel’s phone monitored frantic activity, racing around the house as he staged the burglary and running up and down the stairs. Jessica’s health app remained still until after her death when it recorded a movement of 14 paces as her husband took the iPhone from her body and deposited it outside to make it look as though the “burglar” had dropped it as he left.
There have been a number of other cases in which data from smartphones and smartwatches has played a crucial role, by identifying activity or locations that contradicted a story told by a suspect.
Immediately she had cause for concerns, 22-year-old Oluwabamise Ayanwola resorted to her mobile phone to record a video of herself with voice notes. It is a premonition that has haunted his killers(s) and left authorities with authentic leads to a crime that is both shocking and revealing on why they need to do more in ‘ intelligence profiling’ of their employee.
A Punch newspaper report also shows how phone accessories expose murder suspect in Katsina.
Similarly, a Chitungwiza man in Zimbabwe was dragged to court to answer to murder charges after he was reportedly linked to the murder through the deceased’s cellphone.
Also the findings of a Working Paper by the Department of Economics, Columbia University, USA shows that “homicide rates fell sharply in the early 1990s, a decade that also saw the mainstreaming of cell phones – a concurrence that may be more than a coincidence, we propose. Cell phones may have undercut turf-based street dealing, thus undermining drug-dealing profits of street gangs, entities known to engage in violent crime. Studying county-level data for the years 1970-2009 we find that the expansion of cellular phone service (as proxied by antenna-structure density) lowered homicide rates in the 1990s. Furthermore, effects were concentrated in urban counties; among Black or Hispanic males; and more gang/drug-associated homicides.”
While Nigerians await the outcome of investigatuons over citizen Oluwabamise Ayanwola case, it is obvious that technology, her mobile phone, is the key unraveller of how she was murdered.
