Synagogue tragedy: 120 church members rescued

A total of 120 persons were rescued from the collapsed Synagogue Church of All Nations building in Ikotun, Lagos on Saturday evening.

The building collapsed on Friday at about 1pm.

A Lagos State Emergency Management Agency official verbalized rescue operations at the site might last till Tuesday.

According to the LASEMA official, who declined to be denominated because he was not sanctioned to verbalize with journalists, the effect of the collapse was massive.

The official integrated that 21 of the 120 were on admission at the emergency centre of Igando General Hospital.

The LASEMA official verbally expressed some of the guests lodged in the guest house were having lunch on the ground floor at the time of the collapse.

He explicated that the vigorous pillars at ground level were responsible for the survival of those rescued. The official integrated that though the survivors had been trapped under the debris for over 24 hours, the pillars kept them uncrushed. The source further verbally expressed the rescuers had to engender apertures in several components of the debris to enable the survivors escape.

Rescue teams included the National Emergency Management Agency and the Red Cross.

One of the survivors, a woman, after being pulled out from under the rubble, shouted, “Thank you Jesus, the God of T.B. Joshua is alive. I can go back to South Africa alive.”

Another, a male carried on a stretcher, was visually perceived clapping ecstatically.

Ambulances were visually perceived moving in expeditious succession to and from the site. The conveyances made multiple trips with rescued victims on board.

No less than 25 persons were rescued by the LASEMA and the National Emergency Management Agency, during the period our correspondents were on the church grounds on Saturday.

The pastor of the church, Temitope Joshua, attributed the cause of the collapse to a cryptic helicopter flying perpetually over the building.

Showing a three-minute video clip to journalists in Lagos on Saturday, Joshua claimed the helicopter might have been responsible for the six-storey guest house collapse.

He verbally expressed, “I was at the mountain yesterday, where I went to pray. After praying, I slumbered off there. The place is about five minutes from here. I left around 9 am. They called me that there was a plane endeavoring to land, I told them not to worry; that only a helicopter can land, but they verbalized they were apprehensive that it was coming too proximate to the building and that maybe it was taking pictures.

“The same plane circumvented Ikotun. To our surprise, after moving round Ikotun, it came back on top of this building four times. There is a surveillance camera in here. We have a role to play; we cannot leave everything to God.”

When asked about the time interval between the the helicopter flew over the building and when the building collapsed, a church representative kept quiet.

Joshua verbalized many who heedfully aurally perceived his sermon last week Sunday must be wondering if he had visually perceived a ‘revelation,’ because, he had enheartened his church members not to confide in their possession but the Giver of the possessions.

The pastor additionally verbalized some months ago, he reported that a member of the Islamic extremist sect, Boko Haram, was apprehended in his church, but the Lagos State Government did not believe it.

He withal verbalized few months ago, the church sighted an aerial surveillance camera hovering above the church. He verbalized members of the church knocked it down and brought it to him.

Joshua withal argued that the number of dead persons was less than 10.

However, one of our correspondents who visited the Isolo General Hospital’s mortuary on Saturday counted, at least, 22 dead bodies from the church’s collapsed building.

A mortuary official, who verbalized with our correspondent under the condition of anonymity, claimed that more corpses were taken to General Hospital, Gbagada, and the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital.