*House set ablaze

A navy commodore got lucky at the weekend. Assassins, who reportedly stormed his home to kill him, did not meet him.

Infuriated, the assassins, believed to be oil bunkerers, set the house ablaze.

Commodore Allen Benson Edema, Commandant of the Nigeria Merchant Navy, Seafarer, Maritime, Petroleum Security and Safety Corps, was said to have been a thorn in the flesh of oil bunkerers  in the Sapele area of  Delta State.

Edema had, on Wednesday, unknown to the gangsters, traveled to Abuja to attend  a meeting of his family preparatory  to the burial of his late mother.  Allegedly angered by his absence when they came, the bunkerers  set ablaze his house in Sapele.

The bunkerers, reportedly  led by two men  identified as Friday and Daniel,  were said to have accused the navy officer of disrupting their activities on the waterways of  Delta State and vowed to kill him and members of his family.

Sunday Vanguard learnt that some members of the bunkering syndicate had been arrested and handed over to the police  while all  efforts to compromise the commodore  proved abortive, hence the resort to the attack.

It was gathered that two of the bunkerers  were among those who confronted the officials of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, when they stormed  Delta State, sometime ago, to effect  the arrest of a chieftain of one of the political parties.

A source close to the navy officer said he could identify two of the bunkerers and  was not intimidated by the razing of his house.

“What our boss wants is for the Federal and state governments to give his corps the necessary power and equipment to fight the oil thieves to total submission”, one of his lieutenants  said.