Former world heavyweight boxing champion Anthony Joshua has been discharged from hospital, state officials said, after surviving a fatal car accident in Nigeria that killed two of his close friends.
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Joshua was travelling on Monday with friends Sina Ghami and Latif Ayodele on a busy highway linking Lagos and Ibadan in the southwest of the country when their SUV rammed into a stationary truck.
The Traffic Compliance and Enforcement Agency (TRACE) in Ogun state, where the accident occurred, said preliminary investigations showed the vehicle was moving at excessive speed and had burst a tyre before the crash.
“Anthony Joshua was discharged from hospital late this afternoon,” Lagos and Ogun state governments spokesmen said in a joint statement late Wednesday night.
“Though heavy hearted and full of emotion over the loss of his two close friends, he was deemed clinically fit to recuperate at home,” Lagos state’s spokesman Gbenga Omotoso and his Ogun counterpart Kayode Akinmade said.
Both state governments have been overseeing the boxer’s treatment since the crash.
After leaving the hospital, the former heavyweight champion and his mother paid their respects at the funeral home where the bodies of his friends were “being prepared for repatriation”, the statement said.
Nigerian police said the two victims died at the scene.
Joshua, 36, was admitted at Lagos’s Lagoon Hospital, the statement said, contradicting earlier information by a TRACE official who gave the name of a different hospital.
Joshua’s family hails from the southwest Nigerian city and he is known to visit there when he is in the country.
Lagos, Nigeria’s bustling economic capital, throngs with visitors from across the country and diaspora each December.
Photos released by the police showed a mangled wreckage of a black sports utility vehicle.
In December, Joshua knocked out YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul in a Netflix-backed bout in Miami.
The former Olympic champion Joshua has since been linked with a fight against compatriot and fellow former world champion Tyson Fury.
Joshua’s last fight before the match with Paul was a fifth round knockout loss to fellow Briton Daniel Dubois in September 2024.