By Emma Amaize

…It’s not true, says DPO
RESIDENTS of Oleh and Ozoro in Isoko South and Isoko North Local Government Areas of  Delta State respectively have come under siege by the men of under world in the past two months.

Investigation by Sunday Vanguard showed that the people are troubled that the police, who were supposed to protect  lives and property,  may have been compromised by the brigands. Because of the worsening insecurity, commercial banks in the area were forced to shut down  on a number of occasions.

Monarch calls for total overhaul
The Odiologbo (monarch) of Oleh Kingdom, HRM A.W.O Ovrawah Omogha I,  in a  petition to the Inspector-General of Police, Mr. Mohammed Abubakar,  urged the police boss to carry out a total overhauling of the Oleh Divisional Police Headquarters.

He emphasized the need to effect changes from the headship of the division by bringing in officers who have zero-tolerant  for  crime, adding, “There is no gainsaying  that the totality of evidence and attitude of some of the officers on ground at the division are pointers to the fact that they have compromised standard.”

Final year student shot dead
Investigation by Sunday Vanguard showed that criminals were operating with reckless abandon in Oleh, Ozoro and environs. In one impudent attack, bandits stormed a hostel occupied by students of Delta State University at its Oleh campus,  and shot dead a final year student of petroleum and gas engineering, Itobore Agoreyor.

Agoeyor’s offence was that he had the temerity to demand for the SIM card of his phone from the gunmen, who robbed the entire students in the hostel of their phones, notebooks and undisclosed amount of money.

A resident told this reporter, “As if there is no security, robbers have been moving from one student hostel to the other in Oleh in the past few months and also extended their operations to the community in general”. According to reports, armed robbers raided an electronics shop on Emore Road and carried out a house-to- house operation  in Caps Street, Off Odoro Road for hours without response from the police.

MD Abubakar, Police IG

Self-imposed curfew
“They robbed the entire street for three hours, shooting and destroying iron gates like ordinary robber”, he added. Before this, students holding fellowship sessions outside the school premises were attacked and the fear of armed robbers had made many residents to impose curfew on themselves.

A student, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said, “We are living with our hearts in our mouths in Oleh. No night passes in the past two weeks without you hearing about one robbery or the other. And the fear is not only among the students, it pervades the entire town. They are tormenting the entire residents of Oleh and we do not know what the police are doing”.

It was learnt that the audacious robbers recently invaded a meeting, where some chiefs in Oleh were discussing the growing insecurity in the town and robbed them of valuables.

“We are worried”, a resident informed Sunday Vanguard, “because we cannot see any concrete effort the police are making to curtail the situation”.

Businesspersons are also fleeing from the community, while some villagers called for deployment of soldiers in Oleh to checkmate the bandits.

Police aiding bandits
Oleh monarch, HRM Omoagha I, who corroborated our findings in his petition, said the people, in a move to arrest insecurity in the town, effected a change in the headship of the Oleh vigilance group on August 2, 2012, after the members alleged that the leadership of the group was incompetent. He, however, asserted that some police officers appeared  to be frustrating the fight against criminals.

His words,  “The change in the headship of the vigilante group would have paid off when another armed robbery incident took place in the early hours of Monday, August 6,  but for its truncation by the police in Oleh, who deliberately fired shots at members of the Oleh vigilante group and, in the process, one Mr. Edafe George, the secretary to the Oleh vigilante group, narrowly escaped death. He was severely injured in the police onslaught.

“Another worrisome dimension to this robbery incident,  which showed that there is a form of connivance between the police and the robbers,  is the fact that members of the vigilante group from Irri, a neighbouring community to Oleh, who were coming on a rescue mission during the robbery incident, were sent back by the police at Iyanga Market junction”, he added.

Plan to raze police  station averted
Recalling the robbery incident in which a final – year engineering student was killed by armed robbers, he said irate mob would have razed the Oleh  police station, but for his intervention in conjunction with members of his cabinet and the provost of Delta State University, Oleh campus.

He said the grouse of the people was that the police were alerted about the robbery incident , which lasted for two hours,  but they didn’t  show  up, while members of community’s  vigilance group,  on patrol, were reportedly  barred from getting to the robbery scene to confront the armed robbers.

… Ignore distress calls
According to him, “These are the scenarios, which played out during similar robbery incidents and occurrences in Ichofu Street, IDC Road, Odoro Road, among other streets in Oleh.  Our major grouse is that distressed calls made to the police at Oleh Division were not always attended to as they always surfaced after the robbers had concluded their onslaught on my people.”

The monarch, who accused the police of systematically disarming members of the vigilante team of the dane guns they were using in their operations, noted,  “My IGP, I do not agree less with you in your comment recently in a newspaper that: ‘Policemen do fraternize with criminals.’

“I am in tandem with your directive that no policeman should spend more than two years in a duty post so as not to give room for unnecessary, undue and unholy familiarity alliance between them and criminals. For instance, in Oleh Division, we have officers who have stayed more than 10 years in the division.”

Cultists in charge in Ozoro
The story is not different at Ozoro, where police officers were also said to be lackadaisical to their duties.  Gunmen recently ran amok in the town, shooting a man, Mr. James Epete Athowhora, to death and injuring one Mr. Tony Ezeh . The Ozoro incident is believed to be the handiwork of cultists, who engaged the community’s vigilance group in a fierce gun battle  in  August.

A source hinted that  the cultists visited  Athowhora at about 2.30 a.m. and shot him  on the chest.  Ezeh’s,  undoing was that he encountered the cultists  while  trying to dispose of the remains of the deceased. They shot him in the process.

We will flush out criminals- Police spokesperson, Muka
Spokesperson of Delta State Police Command, Mr Charles Muka, said  he was aware of the killing of a student at Oleh and the police were investigating the incident.

He, however, said he was not aware of the spate of attacks referred to by Sunday Vanguard and said he would find out if the incidents were reported to the police. Muka, nevertheless, did not forget to add that the police were determined to flush out bandits from the state.

DPO disagrees with monarch
In a reaction to the allegations against the division, the Divisional Police Officer, DPO, Mr. Chris Sogbara, dismissed the points raised by the monarch, saying  they were not true.

Explaining the circumstances that led to the petition, he said, “We received a distressed call from one Henry on Monday, August 6, 2012, informing of a robbery incident.

“I immediately put a call to my patrol team and they swung into action. On reaching the scene of crime, my men saw a young man in a nearby bush with a gun and they fired at him. The incident was recorded in our crime diary, the man that was shot and the informant made statements.”