Ozioma Ikpe, a female member of a gang of armed robbers and kidnappers, on Monday, February 5, 2018, told journalists that her husband’s brother implicated her in the kidnap case for which she was arrested. Ikpe and other suspected gang members were paraded on Monday in Umuahia, the Abia State capital.
The suspect from Osisioma Local Government Area, who is in her late 20s, said her husband’s brother, whose name she did not mention, came to her house with a box and gave her to keep.
According to her, she took the box and kept. She said: “Two days later, policemen brought him to the house where he requested for the box. When I brought the box they opened it and there was a short gun inside.
The police then arrested me as an accomplice. But honestly I was not neither aware of the content nor know about the operation.” However, Stanley Ifeanyi, the leader of the gang, also from Osisioma, confessed that they actually carried out kidnap operation. He said that they were arrested after the third operation. Ifeanyi said they got N400,000 ransom in the first kidnap operation, while the second fetched them N1 million.
According to him, luck ran out on them when the third operation went awry as their victim turned out to be a police officer. He said: “We saw the man park his Toyota Highlander in the evening and we trailed and intercepted him.
As we struggled with him, one of the boys snatched his pistol and I didn’t know. It was in the bush where we kept him that he told me and I appealed to the boy to return his gun. I was actually touched when the police officer appealed for the return of the gun because he said it might cost him his job.”
Ifeanyi said that he joined the gang when a friend, Ogbonna Eze aka Val, suggested to him to team up with him to make money. The 38-year-old man said Val told him that he had a gun which they could use to make money to establish their businesses.
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