By Ifeanyi Okolie

Operatives of the Inspector General of Police Special Intelligence Response Team, IRT, have arrested seven members of a notorious kidnapping gang who masterminded the January 12, 2017, killing of a United States Army veteran, Chuks Okebata in Okigwe area of Imo State.

Kidnap

The suspects who were identified as Sunday Igwe, alias, School Boy, Michael Ahmefula, Oyebuchi Echefule, Ndubusi Isaac, Victor Dagogo, Chima Okoro and John Edet, were said to have carried out several high profile kidnappings and armed robberies within Imo, Abia and Rivers State. They were all rounded up at separate locations while two Ak-47 rifles and six magazines loaded with 127 live ammunitions were recovered from them. Vanguard gathered that efforts to apprehend these suspects commenced few months after the American soldier was kidnapped and killed.

Sources disclosed to Vanguard that several persons who had fallen victims of the gang’s activities wrote petitions to the Inspector General of Police, Adamu Mohammed who then directed the operatives led by Deputy Commissioner of Police Abba Kyari, to track down the suspects.

Vanguard gathered that based on the information provided by some of the victims, the IRT operatives in Abia State, trailed the leader of the gang, School-Boy to a hotel in Aba town where he was apprehended. A source who spoke to Vanguard on the condition of anonymity said “based on information about the gang, we arrested the gang leader Sunday Okechuwu Igwe, a.k.a school boy, in a hotel. We were on his trail for six months before we eventually arrested him in January 2018 and recovered two Ak-47 rifles and six magazines loaded with 127 live ammunition from him. We then went after members of his gang and we arrested his second in command, Michael Ahamefula alongside another gang member, Oyebuchi Echefule, in a hotel in Port Harcourt, Rivers State. We then went on to arrest Ndubusi Isaac, Victor Dagogo, Chima Okoro and John Edet in Orlu and Aba areas of Abia and Imo States, who were all members of the gang”, the source stated.

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When Vanguard interviewed the suspects they confessed to be members of a deadly armed robbery and kidnapping gang terrorizing Imo, Abia and Rivers States.

Why we killed the American soldier —Gang leader

The leader of the gang, School-Boy, in his confession said that the American soldier, Okebata, was killed because he tried to kill them after he was kidnapped. He explained that he and members of his gang didn’t know that Okebata, had a pistol with him at the time he was kidnapped. He said, “we threw him into the boot of our operational vehicle after we kidnapped him and we didn’t know who he was. While we were heading to our camp where we would keep him and negotiate for his ransom, he pulled out his gun and started shooting at us from the boot. The bullet hit me on the leg and hit the driver on his hand. I then asked the driver stop the vehicle. We disarmed him, killed him at the spot and dumped his body inside a drainage and left. I had no intention of killing him but he forced us into doing it.” he stated

The 29-year-old Schoool-Boy, who is a native of Bendel Local Government Area of Abia State and a secondary school dropout then narrated how he went into crime and how he carried out most of his operations.

According to him, “after I dropped out of school in 2009, I went to Iwofe area of Port Harcourt where I learned how to drive truck and in 2010 I met some boys, Oshare and Op, at a smoking joint where they introduced me into crime. We started by snatching cars, my job was to drive the cars out of town and mostly to Eleme area of Port Harcourt, where it will be sold off and I earned N20,000 for each operation. After a while, I went back to my village and met one of my brothers, Samuel, who was also into car snatching and he allowed me joined his gang. I was linked to the gang leader, KC and we started snatching cars in Aba town. Samuel was the owner of the guns we were using to snatch the cars while he job Ejike, another member of our gang was to drive us in his car to the location where we would snatch the cars. I was earning N60,000 on each operation. I later met one Mazi, who introduced me into kidnaping and wanted a place where he would be keeping his victims.

I provided my family house in the village and I was equally looking after the victims after they have been kidnapped. But later on some DSS men who came looking for him shot at me and got me injured, but I escaped and was taken to the hospital where I spent eight months. When I returned, I met KC again but this time, he was already into kidnapping and he had Ak-47rifles. I teamed up with him and we started kidnapping. Our first operation was in Imo state, we have no specific target, we would just move round the city looking for people with flashy cars to kidnap. There was one man we went after but we didn’t know that he had policemen with him and the moment the policemen came down, we opened fire on them and killed them on the spot. We then collected their rifles and kidnaped a man we found inside the vehicle. We didn’t know that the man we kidnapped was an ordinary driver and not the owner of the vehicle or the person the policemen were protecting. We had also kidnapped one other person on the road before that incident and we took the two victims to our camp.”

“After that operation, we all became very tired and slept off for a long time and our victims, who we left unguarded escaped and alerted the police. By the time we woke up we realized that the police were everywhere looking for us. KC was unlucky, he was gunned down while he was trying to escape and the police recovered one of his rifles. We stopped kidnapping for a long time but we resumed when we believed the police were no longer looking for us. On the night we killed the American soldier, we had three rifles with us and went out looking for victims. We then we spotted the American soldier in his Infinity SUV, we pursued him and kidnapped him put him in the boot of the vehicle without knowing that he had a gun with him. When we got to Ata Junction, on the Okigwe Road, the soldier started shooting and his bullet hit me on my hand. He shot the driver on the leg, then I came out, killed him and we dumped his body inside drainage. After that operation, I lost all my guns because some IRT operatives swooped on Mazi and Ejike and they took my guns from him. I then ran to Ghana when the operatives were after me and returned to Nigeria in November 2017 and resumed kidnapping.

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We realized N26.5m from four operations — Ahamefuna

On his part, 28-year-old Michael Ahamefuna, who is the second in command in the group and married with two children said; “I reside in Port Harcourt and I am from Abia state. I am a trader and I met School-boy in a smoking joint where we took drugs. He had an injury in his leg then and he took me to his village where we met one KC. We formed a kidnap gang and kidnapped a man who paid us N1.5million. We went for another operation that fetched us N15million. We also kidnapped two other victims in Owerri and took them to Abia state and we got N10million from them. The last operation that got us into trouble occurred in October 2018 and we lost our leader in that operation”.