A 34-year-old man, identified simply as John, has died after drowning during a church hangout at the Elegushi Beach in Lagos State.
Reports said that John died last Saturday after members of the unnamed church in the Ikorodu area of Lagos visited the beach.
It was a negative fallout of a picnic organised for the youths in the church.
John was declared missing when the members were about to leave the beach on Saturday afternoon.
As the church members began searching for him, someone informed them that they had seen him go into the water.
Lifeguards and divers were also alerted, but efforts to locate him in the water that Saturday proved abortive.
His body was recovered by lifeguards at the beach on Tuesday afternoon.
“A church from Ikorodu had come to Elegushi beach for a hangout on Saturday. They were just young people who came around to have fun; about 35 of them came that Saturday.
“It happened that late in the afternoon when they were packing up to leave, they called everyone to make sure that they were all accounted for, 35 of them, before they left. That was how they realised that one of them, John, was missing.
“Then they started searching for him that evening. Then, someone told one of them that he had seen the guy walk towards the water thinking he knew how to swim.
“The group then called lifeguards and divers to help search for him that Saturday, but they didn’t find him until yesterday, Tuesday, about 1 p.m., when they recovered his body at the beach,” a source, who witnessed the event told Punch.
Confirming the incident, the Lagos State Police Public Relations Officer, Benjamin Hundeyin, said the family of the victim had been contacted, adding that his body had been deposited at the Yaba General Hospital for an autopsy.
