In a statement reacting to an interview Umahi granted Arise Television on October 22, 2026, the families questioned why the minister, who was governor of Ebonyi State when the engineers disappeared, had repeatedly made public claims about their alleged deaths while the police and the Department of State Services (DSS) had yet to provide a comprehensive public account of their investigations.
The families also questioned the minister’s expression of sympathy, describing his account of the incident as “mere entertainment, propaganda and conspiracy theory”.
“We reiterate with absolute boldness and without fear of contradiction that the Minister has a case to answer,” the statement said.
According to the families, Umahi was the first person to disclose details about the engineers’ alleged killing and burial, including the route they reportedly took, the person expected to lead them and claims that their alleged killers took an oath at a shrine.
“He had this information before the DSS and Police concluded investigations,” the statement added.
The families further questioned why Umahi had become the public voice of a contractor identified as Marco, whom the minister reportedly announced had died two weeks earlier.
During the Arise Television interview, the interviewer reportedly challenged Umahi over his involvement in the matter, asking: “What really happened? You were just the governor, why are you in the picture? Why are they calling your name ceaselessly?”
The families said the minister responded by describing the controversy as politicisation but also made claims that the engineers had been killed, their bodies burnt to ashes and their killers had taken an oath at a shrine.
They questioned the source of the information and demanded an explanation for the alleged failure to conduct DNA profiling on skeletal remains that police reportedly presented to them as belonging to their missing relatives.
“In the same breath, he said police exhumed the bodies and asked families to collect them. All these clues came from the governor alone. Why then did you refuse to do DNA profiling of the skeletal remains you told families to collect?” the statement asked.
The families stressed that Umahi was governor at the time of the disappearance and was neither a police officer nor a spokesperson for the DSS.
“We remind the Minister that at the time of the incident he was Governor, not Commissioner of Police or DSS spokesperson, to be bombarding the media with misrepresentation of a crime being investigated by those agencies,” they said.
They maintained that neither the police nor the DSS had publicly provided a satisfactory account of what happened to the five engineers.
The families also referred to an alleged conversation on October 31, 2025, between the wife of the lead engineer and former Ebonyi State Commissioner of Police, Garuba Aliyu. According to them, Aliyu said he could not confirm whether the engineers were dead.
“Only David Nweze Umahi has this privileged information,” the statement said.
They added that, apart from Umahi and an individual identified as Chioma Nweze, they were unaware of any other state official who had provided information about what allegedly happened to the engineers.
Describing the situation as a “red flag”, the families said their priority was not a dispute over the technical details of the road construction contract but finding out what happened to their relatives.
“The wives and families are not concerned with technicalities of contracts. We want justice for the five engineers,” they stated.
The families also rejected Umahi’s account that a communal crisis affected the area where the engineers were working, insisting that no such crisis occurred during the project.
According to their statement, NELAN Consulting Ltd had worked at the site for 14 months before the engineers disappeared on November 3, 2021. They said the team had travelled along the same route nearly 30 times without incident.
The families described the community as friendly and maintained that the engineers encountered no trouble on the day they went missing.
“Femi, the surveyor working with Nelan, was there that day and worked peacefully,” the statement said.
They challenged the minister to explain who informed him that the engineers were supposed to use a different route and demanded to know the whereabouts of the bodies.
“Who told the governor the engineers were supposed to follow a different road? Where are the bodies to date?” they asked.
The controversy surrounding the skeletal remains has featured in previous allegations made by the families against the Ebonyi State Police Command.
In a report published by SaharaReporters on July 22, the families alleged that police repeatedly declined to conduct DNA profiling on skeletal remains presented to them as those of the missing engineers. They claimed officers cited a lack of funds for the exercise.
The families said they insisted on scientific confirmation before accepting the remains, including one set of skeletal remains that they alleged had no head.
“We made one simple demand: conduct DNA profiling before we accept the remains. Without scientific confirmation, there was no way to know if these were truly our loved ones,” they said in the earlier statement.
They alleged that, after repeated delays, they had to finance an independent DNA examination in the United States.
“Faced with this wall of delay, the families had no choice but to fund an independent DNA test in the USA,” they said, crediting a pathologist with helping them pursue the examination.
The families further alleged that police eventually collected samples but did not complete the test.
They also cited what they described as conflicting accounts from Bruno Okonkwo, an officer in charge of the Anti-Kidnapping and Robbery Unit.
According to the families, Okonkwo insisted on February 13, 2026, that the skeletal remains belonged to the missing engineers. However, they alleged that on February 14, he told their lawyer, Femi Falana (SAN), that the remains had been incinerated.
“But just one day later, on the 14th of February 2026, when Femi Falana (SAN) called him to ask about the same skeletal remains, he said they had been incinerated,” the families said.
“Incinerated? Evidence destroyed?” they asked.
The allegations concerning the handling and identification of the skeletal remains have not been independently established in the account provided.
The families maintained that the failure to establish the identities of the remains had heightened their suspicions about the investigation.
In their earlier statement, they alleged that the remains did not belong to the missing engineers and accused authorities of a cover-up.
The families are demanding clear answers about the disappearance, the alleged discovery and subsequent handling of the skeletal remains, and the status of the investigations.
They insist that the priority should be establishing the facts surrounding the disappearance of the five engineers and ensuring accountability for any wrongdoing.
The claims made by the families and the minister’s reported statements have not, in the material provided, been independently verified. Umahi’s response to the specific allegations raised in the families’ latest statement was also not included.
