The menace of cattle rustlers has assumed a violent and worrisome dimension in the country, with the attendant cases of rape, murder and destruction of farmlands in some parts of the country. Parts of Delta, Edo , many south eastern states and the Northern region have suffered untold pang of pain and trauma from suspected rustlers, with their women attacked while going to farms.

The 42-year-old, who is a High Chief in Warri North Local Government Area of Delta State, a title he said he received from his community for being a philanthropist, also told the police that he turned a new leaf, after his last robbery operation at Agbara area of Ogun State, where he and his gang carted away over N110millon from the bank and also left several persons, including a pregnant woman dead .

Operatives of the Inspector General of Police Special Intelligence Response Team, IRT, weekend, in Benin, Edo State, reportedly arrested a leader of a gang of bank robbers, who usually disguised as a woman during operations.

T he mysterious disappearance of an Enugu State-born businessman based in Minna, Niger State, Chidiebere Didiugwu, 37, eight months ago, has continued to raise dust. In fact, anxiety, confusion and apprehension are common words expressed by indigenes of Umushere, Abbi Community in Uzo-Uwani Local Government Area, Enugu State, following the ugly incident. The business tycoon who embarked on a journey, last May 2015, to Kogi State, in an effort to collect debt allegedly owed him for over a year ago, reportedly disappeared into thin air. Concerted efforts made by his relations and friends to locate him either dead or alive have woefully failed.

Standing among forty other suspects arrested over various crimes ranging from robbery, rape, impersonation and cultism, at the Lagos State Police Command headquarters, Ikeja , Wednesday, was an under-aged boy whose appearance struck this reporter. Judging from his fragile frame to his malnourished looks, coupled with an expression of fear on his light skinned face, nothing would have passed him for any of the offences listed against him.

Since the dastardly murder in cold blood of the Head of Protocol Unit of the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF), Mr. Ibrahim Abubakar, many people who knew this amiable gentleman before his untimely death have been asking one question; what could have made anybody to want to kill him even in his own house?

“We are not vandals. I have never been to the creeks before. This is the second time I am joining them for such surveillance. It was Semiu that invited me the first time. Semiu works for the CSO. He only contracted us to work for him . He has not even paid us . It was only Semiu that was armed. The rest of us were just with torch-lights”.

Four suspects who were alleged to be members of a gang of robbers who recently broke into a branch of an old generation bank in Ilututu area of Ondo State, have said they were disappointed not finding a dime in the bank’s vault. The suspects, who were rounded up last weekend, by operatives of the Inspector General of Police Special Intelligence Response Team, SIRT, in Ondo State, were said to have broken into the bank with the aid of a security guard, who had worked with bank.

I didn’t know him before but he assured me that he would talk to a driver or conductor to help me get to Badagry. We were still at the bus stop when I was arrested alongside the man I had asked for help. It was when I got to the station that I realised that someone had been killed. I have never seen the deceased. I don’t even know whether he is fair or dark.”

For those who witnessed the kidnapping incidents that swept through Aba and environs before the deployment of soldiers of the Joint Military Task Force (Operation Jubilee) in 2010, it was an experience no one would like to relive. Aba and its neighbouring communities became ghost towns as residents fled to safer places. Businesses, markets, banks and schools were shut down to avoid the invasion of the then dreaded notorious kidnap kingpin, Osisikankwu, and his gang. That was then.