The late Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Prof. Babatunde Osotimehin, was reported to have passed on while watching television alone in his home in New York early hours of Monday, Nigerian Time reports.

A close family source, who spoke under anonymity, said he was in the same house with Osotimehin when he died.


He further disclosed that he met the Ex-Minister of Health in an unresponsive state before the TV set was watching after he returned from church on Sunday.

According to him, it was only after he had tried communicating with him in vain, and had also sought to nudge him awake to no response, that it dawned on him that the former minister had passed on.

The 68-year-old UN bureaucrat is suspected to have died of cardiac arrest, even though this is yet to be confirmed.

The family members spoken to said the funeral rites of the late professor would be announced at a later date.

Born on February 6, 1949, Mr. Osotimehin attended Igbobi College between 1966 and 1971.

After his medical studies at the University of Ibadan, he received a doctorate in medicine from the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, in 1979.

Osotimehin, headed Nigeria’s AIDS agency (NACA), before he became health minister, and was one of the most senior Nigerians within the United Nations system, who had been on his second term as a UN Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UNFPA.