went beyond their brief when they connived with another man, who is at
large, to rob Mr. Joseph Ogueri of his car at gunpoint.
The act expectedly cut short the joy of Ogueri, a professional welder,
who had struggled to save money to purchase the Volkswa-gen Golf 3
Convertible on Decem-ber 2, 2014, and was happy that he had joined the
club of car owners.
As at the time the act was committed, Ogueri was about to register it.
Piqued by the role played by the policemen, Ogueri in a petition
written on his behalf by Barrister Ugonna Ihediwa of Mahatma Chambers
to the Imo State Com-missioner of Police requested the police boss as
well as the Assis-tant Inspector General of Police in-charge of Zone 9
Command, Umuahia, to investigate the two police officers and bring
them to book for armed robbery.
Narrating his sad experience to Sunday Sun, Ogueri, a native of
Amachara Avu in Ikeduru Local Government Area of Imo State said that
whenever he was not busy at his workshop, he usually augmented his
income as a com-mercial motorcyclist. It was in the course of doing
that on March 11, 2015 that a certain man hired him to take him to a
place along Naze Road, Owerri, Imo State, where he claimed he wanted
to issue a cheque to some landowners in respect of the land that he
had ac-quired for the purpose of mounting a GSM mast. He further
revealed that when they got to the place the man paid him off.
"When I closed from the okada business and parked my motorbike and I
got into my car which was parked at the Road Safety Junc-tion,
Owerri/Egbu road preparato-ry to going back home, I saw the same man
again. As I was about to drive off, he pleaded with me to give him a
ride to the hotel where he said he was staying and even said that I
should be coming every morning to take him to the project site for the
GSM mast."
Continuing, Ogueri said that, when he got to the hotel the man asked
him to wait as he wanted him to take him to somewhere else. At the
hotel, the man met two of the policemen who were de-ployed from Owerri
North Police Division as guards.
His words: "When I dropped him at the hotel and wanted to go, the man
asked me to wait because he wanted me to take him to somewhere else.
Later, he pleaded with me to buy him a padlock with which to secure
his bag because according to him, the housekeepers in the hotel always
have a spare key to all the rooms. Reluctantly, I went to buy the
padlock and when I came back few minutes later, the man was already
drinking beer with the two policemen (one of them was a po-lice
inspector). He also offered me a bottle of beer which I accepted."
While they were still drinking, the man took Ogueri's car key that was
on the table, saying that he wanted to pick his colleagues at the Road
Safety junction, Egbu Road. But Ogueri refused insisting that he would
take the man himself to the junction. Then surprisingly, the police
inspector and his col-league ordered him at gunpoint to step aside as
both the inspector and the man entered his car and drove off while the
other policeman held him hostage at the hotel.
Ogueri said he became alarmed when the police inspector came back to
the hotel alone without the man. When he inquired about the man and
his car, the inspector claimed that the man left him at Roget
Restaurant in Egbu and that he thought he was already back at the
hotel.
"It was at this point it dawned on me that the policemen were
ac-tually working with the man to rob me of my car because the whole
thing was a set up. As a result, I promptly reported the matter at the
Owerri North Divisional Police Headquarters but they did not do
anything," Ogueri lamented.
Rather, policemen at the division began extorting money from him in
the guise of searching for his car and at the same time conniving with
the two police officers, who had actually stolen his car as they were
never arrested and have continued to work in the same hotel.
"The following day after my car was stolen, officers of the Owerri
North Police Division said that the car had been located at Ore in
Ondo State, and when I spoke to the purported policeman at Ore who was
identified with my car, the voice sounded exactly like that of the man
that colluded with the police inspector at the hotel and his colleague
to steal my car. But they insisted that he was a policeman in Ore and
requested that I should provide them with N25,000 to go to Ore. I was
only able to give them N10,000. But later I discovered that it was all
part of the scam be-cause they never went anywhere. It was just a ploy
to extort money from me. In fact, one of the officers told me
pointblank that the car is gone and that I should forget about it."
--TheSun
No comments:
Post a Comment