Published 25th Oct, 2021

By Emmanuel Uti

Chukwuma Hilary, a music marketer, has narrated how police officers suspected to be attached to Ogudu Police Station arrested and extorted N310,000 from him at gunpoint on Tuesday.

Hilary was journeying from Lekki Phase 1 at noon when a commercial bus double-crossed the Uber car conveying him at Pinnacle Oil, a filling station, in Oniru.

Suspecting only the police could do such, Hilary calmly waited in the car for the officers to interrogate him. However, the actions of the police were beyond interrogation.

“These officers did not show me an identity card; they did not ask me any questions but ordered me to alight from the car and enter their van. It felt like I was being kidnapped, and none of the passers-by said anything,” he said.

Hilary asked the police officers to speak with his father, but they dismissed the idea, insisting that he follow them to their station.

“As I entered their vehicle, I was still thinking of what had just happened when one of them began to slap me. Minutes later, the men handcuffed me,” he said.

“I began to ask what I did wrong when one officer kept referring to me as a street boy. He kept saying, ‘You be street’. Later, they asked to see my phone, which I opened on their orders. On seeing I had a Piggy Vest app, they said I must give them money.”

The officers screamed on sighting about N900,000 in Hilary’s Piggy Vest account. Then they said he would bail himself out with N300,000. By this time, one of the police officers had pointed a gun at the victim.

“After much back and forth, these officers began to drive around Obalende, looking for a Point of Sale (POS) vendor to withdraw my money. When they found one, they asked me to make a transfer to the vendor,” Hilary said.

“Before I transferred the money to the vendor, I explained to the officers that it was a long-time savings for my house rent and school fees, but they told me they were merciful not to have asked for all the N900,000 in my account.

“One of them specifically said they could collect all my money and make me call other people to bail me and nothing would happen. While he said this, others were slapping me for narrating my plight.”

Hilary told FIJ that this was not the first time he would be harassed by the police in Oniru. He also said that he learned that the cops who extorted him were from Ogudu and that they were notorious for illegally arresting people in Oniru.

FIJ placed a call to Celestina Kalu, the Divisional Police Officer in charge of Ogudu, but she said she was in a training. CSP Ajisebutu Adekunle, Lagos State Police Spokesperson, neither answered FIJ’s call nor responded to a text message sent to him.

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