Two policemen attached to the Imo State Police Command allegedly
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 Volkswagen Golf 3
Convertible on December 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 Commissioner of Police requested the police boss as well as the
Assistant 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 commercial
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 acquired 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 Junction, Owerri/Egbu
road preparatory 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 deployed 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 police 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
colleague 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 actually
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 because 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.”
Convinced that the whole incident was a conspiracy by the officers
of the Owerri North Police Division who are bent on protecting their
colleagues, Ogueri decided to hire a lawyer to petition the Commissioner of
Police and the AIG in-charge of Zone 9 Umuahia, to investigate the two police
officers and compel them to replace his car.
- Sun News
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