A madman sleeping by the roadside close to Kpakungu Roundabout in Minna, Niger State, on Wednesday, escaped death when the driver of a Mitsubishi Canter truck loaded with bags of pepper lost control while trying to run from a police patrol team.
The driver was reportedly chased by the police from Paiko village on the Minna-Abuja road for allegedly refusing to give bribe when he was stopped.
When City & Crime arrived the scene, the driver of the truck was said to have been detained at the Kpakungu Division, but his boy, Abubakar Adamu, told City & Crime that, “The policemen demanded money from my boss in Paiko and we gave them N500, but they rejected it. We increased it to N1,000, yet they didn’t collect. So, we left and they started following us until we entered Minna town and they followed one way to block us and we had an accident. We nearly killed a madman who was sleeping by the roadside.”
He added that, “This is what they usually do to us; extorting money from us. We had been on the road for the past two days from Azare in Bauchi State with bags of pepper heading to Lagos. We had spent all the money we had in fixing the truck because it developed faults on the way.”
Meanwhile, some Canter drivers blocked the Minna-Bida road from the Kpakungu Roundabout around 9am, demanding the release of their colleague from police custody.
Effort to reach the spokesman of the police in the state, DSP Wasiu Abiodun, was not successful as his phone line was switched off as at the time of filing this report.
