A Federal High Court in Abuja has dismissed the suit seeking to force the Nigeria Police Force to reopen its investigation into the 2023 death of singer Ilerioluwa Aloba, known as Mohbad, ruling days ahead of the September 29 judgment date the court had itself fixed back in June. Justice James Omotosho threw out the case, marked FHC\/ABJ\/CS\/363\/2026, for lack of legal standing and insufficient evidence, and used the ruling to warn lawyers against discussing pending cases in the media.<\/p>\n
It is a real update, not a rehash. InterSpace Daily covered the September 29 date when it was set; the case never got there, because the judge closed it out first.<\/p>\n
The suit was filed by the Registered Trustees of Break the Silence Foundation against the Inspector-General of Police, the Nigeria Police Force and the Commissioner of Police for Lagos State, seeking an order of mandamus to compel a fresh investigation. None of the three respondents appeared in court, according to multiple Nigerian outlets that covered the ruling, including Vanguard, TheNigeriaLawyer and TheWhistler.<\/p>\n
Justice Omotosho found that the foundation lacked the standing to bring the case and, more specifically, had not produced the original police investigation report to back up its central claim: that certain people close to Mohbad, including his wife and father, were never properly investigated. Without that report, the judge said, there was “nothing to show that the said persons were investigated or not,” and the suit amounted to speculation rather than evidence. He is reported to have said plainly that lawyers should know better than to “flood the courts with frivolous and baseless cases.”<\/p>\n
The judge also used the ruling to caution lawyers against giving media interviews about matters still before the court, warning that public commentary on pending proceedings risks shaping perception of evidence and exhibits, and that the court would consider contempt action against lawyers who keep doing it. That warning lands squarely on a case that has been argued as much in press conferences and Instagram posts as in court filings.<\/p>\n
Break the Silence Foundation is the human rights organisation founded by Nollywood actor and activist Yomi Fabiyi, who has been the most visible public voice pushing for Mohbad’s case to be reopened since early 2024. Fabiyi’s foundation has organised protests, petitioned the Inspector-General directly, and held press conferences calling for family members to be questioned, most recently timed around Mohbad’s third-year remembrance on September 12. The suit dismissed this week, filed on the foundation’s behalf by lawyer Tunde Falola, was the legal vehicle for that pressure campaign, and its dismissal does not resolve the underlying dispute so much as close off one route to reopening it.<\/p>\n
It is worth being precise here: the specific accusations Fabiyi has aired publicly, including claims about how earlier suspects were handled and calls for named individuals to face fresh scrutiny, are his allegations, made outside this ruling. This week’s judgment did not evaluate or validate them; it found the court filing itself didn’t clear the evidentiary bar to proceed.<\/p>\n
Mohbad died in Lagos on September 12, 2023, at 27. He was buried the next day, then exhumed eight days later so an autopsy could be performed. That autopsy was inconclusive, reportedly due to the state of decomposition, and his remains have stayed in official custody ever since, three years and counting. His father has said reburial cannot happen until a DNA dispute involving Mohbad’s son is resolved; that testing process has itself stalled, with two of three overseas labs approved by an Ikorodu court for the test reportedly saying they don’t offer it.<\/p>\n
In February 2025, a Lagos magistrate’s court discharged and acquitted singer Naira Marley, music promoter Sam Larry and other co-defendants, after the Lagos State Directorate of Public Prosecutions advised there was no evidence linking them to Mohbad’s death. That left no one facing charges in the case, which is the vacuum Break the Silence Foundation’s suit was trying to fill by going after the police investigation itself rather than any individual.<\/p>\n
Nothing about this ruling brings Mohbad’s remains closer to burial. The DNA dispute that’s actually holding that up sits entirely outside this case. What the ruling does is close off, for now, the specific legal route Break the Silence Foundation was using to compel police back into the file. None of the reports reviewed for this piece indicate whether the foundation intends to appeal, and there’s no public statement yet from Fabiyi or the foundation responding directly to the dismissal.<\/p>\n
What’s not in dispute is the pattern: three years on, a case with no convicted suspects, an unresolved paternity test, and now a court that has told the loudest civil voice pushing for reinvestigation that its filing didn’t meet the bar. For an industry that still hasn’t fully reckoned with how a 27-year-old artist died without anyone being held responsible, a judge’s warning to stop litigating cases in the press is a small, telling detail. It suggests the court sees this less as a cold case crying out for reinvestigation and more as a public pressure campaign that finally ran into a courtroom’s actual evidentiary standard. Whether that reading holds will depend on what Break the Silence Foundation does next, and on whether the DNA impasse ever clears enough to let a burial happen at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Federal High Court in Abuja has thrown out the NGO suit seeking to force a fresh police probe into Mohbad’s death, ruling days before the September 29 date it had originally set. The singer’s remains are still unburied three years on.","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"csco_display_header_overlay":false,"csco_singular_sidebar":"","csco_page_header_type":"","csco_page_load_nextpost":"","csco_post_video_location":[],"csco_post_video_location_hash":"","csco_post_video_url":"","csco_post_video_bg_start_time":0,"csco_post_video_bg_end_time":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[518],"tags":[130,46142,150,1237,39028],"class_list":["post-20610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-policy-legal","tag-afrobeats","tag-mohbad","tag-nigeria","tag-nigerian-music-industry","tag-policy-legal","cs-entry","cs-video-wrap"],"yoast_head":"\n