The three suspects in police net for the murder of two bureau-de-change (BDC) operators, Alhaji Yakubu Musa and Alhaji Hassan Umaru, in Ikorodu, Lagos, about a month ago, have confessed they killed the two men to cover their murder tracks and evade arrest.
The suspects – Oluwatosin Olanrewaju, 40; Mayowa Olawuni, alias General and Babatunde Idris, alias Aloma – were said to have claimed that their initial intention was to kidnap the BDC operators by deceiving them with a $10,000-for-naira exchange transaction and then demand ransom from their family members.
“We actually killed the bureau-de-change operators because we feared they would give police useful information about us that would lead to our arrest,” Idris said. He revealed that the plan to abduct any BDC operator and extort money from his family was conceived after a clash they had with some members of the rival Eiye confraternity sometime in March this year at the Abraham Adesanya area, Ajah, Lagos.
In the clash, he said, over six members of Eiye were killed, while many others sustained varying degrees of wounds.
“After the killing, we needed money to go underground for a while. It was during one of our interactions that the idea of kidnapping BDC operators came up. We never had anyone in mind initially, but we decided to scout for any operator’s number. At last, we were able to get Hassan and Yakubu’s numbers.
“We later placed calls to them saying we had a friend who came into the country from the USA and wanted to change the sum of $10,000. As soon as they heard the amount, they became interested but were a little sceptical of coming to our area. We were able to convince them when we told them that the transaction would be done in a bank.
“We agreed to meet at a bank in Ikorodu. They entered our car when they arrived and we had the initial discussion inside the vehicle. They asked to see the dollars and we said that our friend from America was on his way. After a while, we said we should go and pick him up since he was keeping late. They agreed and we drove off,” the suspect added.
The Lagos State police spokesman, Bala Elkana, in a press statement he issued on the incident, said that the police recovered four dead bodies in a septic tank, with two of them those of the two missing BDC operators.
Elkana said that on March 14, 2019 at about 5.30pm, the Lagos State Police Command received a complaint from Ikorodu that some unidentified persons had approached Alhaji Yakubu Musa and Alhaji Hassan Umaru, BDC operators, at the Benson area, Ikorodu, and informed them they had a relation who had just returned from overseas and needed to sell $10,000.
He said that the gang initially requested that payment would be made in a bank at Ikorodu, but on getting to the bank, the suspects moved the operators to an unknown destination and started demanding for ransom from their friends and relatives.
According to him, despite the family members of the BDC operators paying the sum of N1.6 million to the suspects as ransom, the abductors refused to release their victims and nothing more was heard from them.
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