Mysterious Ibadan 'Strange Fish' is Baby Octopus - Police...or Maybe not! [PHOTO]

The fish seller and the 'strange fish'

While addressing reporters in his office in Ibadan on Wednesday, the Commissioner of Police in Oyo State, Mohammed Ndabawa, debunked the story of a fish with human parts reported in Ibadan on Tuesday.

The police boss who displayed the fish to journalists said people were merely spreading falsehood on the internet concerning the fish that Ms. Salau, who bought the strange fish at Oke Ado, where she usually buys fish, claimed that it developed into a living being shortly after it defrosted.

The CP said the creature was strange to residents of Ibadan because they were not living in
the riverine area.

 “I think it was a baby octopus and not a mermaid as claimed by some reports”.

 He urged the people to remain calm and assured residents that they have no reason to fear as the story around the discovery of a mermaid was not true.

He also said the woman was placed under protective custody and would be released when tension within the town is doused.

Also, the Permanent Secretary, Culture and Tourism, Mr. Bunmi Babalola said as far as he was concerned, the creature was an octopus.

As far as jovoflavour is concerned though, the creature is a Squid not a baby octopus!

…the story so far and different interesting accounts:

The Oyo State capital was thrown into confusion on Tuesday when a middle-age woman and fish vendor, Ramota Salau, supposedly raised an alarm that a fish among those in the carton she bought had suddenly turned into half human, half fish.

The house she stays in Ibadan, a storey building, became a Mecca of sort when the news of a miniature mermaid (omo Yemoja) filtered through the city. People went to catch a glimpse of the ‘miracle fish’ in a bucket where it was kept.

The head of the family and Ramota’s grandfather, Alhaji Raufu A. Salau, a retired civil servant, said he was sleeping upstairs when he heard a lot of unusual noise which forced him to come downstairs. According to him:

“Ramota sells fried and roasted fish in the house and, as usual, purchased a carton of frozen fish that morning. She was in the process of cleaning the fish and separating those to be roasted from the ones to be fried when she was said to have screamed out loud and called on neighbours to come to her aid”.

Salau, , said rather than go upstairs to see him, Ramota ran to meet her Shehu, an Islamic cleric, who followed her home and offered some prayers in the Islamic way before the neighbours, who had begun to converge on the scene, could take the pictures of the strange “fish”.

 The first person who took the picture of the strange fish was said to have had his phone shattered mysteriously.

Mrs. Ramota Salawu later lamented her ordeal with some miscreants who insisted that she must produce the ‘mermaid’ she was hiding in her house.

According to her, the mob beat up her children and destroyed her property including her business when she showed the creature to them that she never saw any mermaid as claimed by the surging crowd.

 Hear her, “even Osun river goddess adherents came saying they had to perform some rituals but I told them I was not an Osun worshipper and that I don’t know anything about mermaids. Later, the police had to rescue me from them.”

Alhaja Alirat, a member of the community, told the Nigerian Tribune that she did not see the mermaid but the lady who claimed to have seen it told her that the mermaid, though very small in size initially, grew bigger and was fish from waist downward and human being from waist upwards, with mouth, nose, eyes and long hair, which it was swinging to cover its eyes when the mammoth crowd thronged to the scene to look at it.

She also said it was alleged that the mermaid spoke, begging Ramota, the fish seller, not to expose it but that Ramota shouted out of fear.

Meanwhile, one Miss Osungbemi, an Osun worshipper, claimed that the mermaid was on a mission to uplift Ramota financially. Rather than shout, she said Ramota ought to have looked for a big basin filled with water and throw the mermaid inside, adding that she should have then called on Osun worshippers who would call the mermaid by its cognomen and tutor the lady on how to appease it.

She said Ramota would have become a consultant, diagnosing and treating people with the aid of the mermaid, who would be telling her what to do, even as she claimed that someone in the house where the mermaid was found must have worshipped Osun at a point in his or her life.

Members of the crowd, who did not give their names, confirmed that Ramota’s mother had worshipped Osun before and that before the occurrence; she had received messages to visit the Osun Osogbo grove to worship Osun, but that she had been complaining that there was no time.

It was overheard that the mermaid had been taken to the house of the Aare Musulumi of Yorubaland, Alhaji AbdulAzeez Arisekola-Alao, in Ibadan.