The Rivers State Commissioner of Police, CP Olatunji Disu, has confirmed the arrest of the police officers accused of abducting one Mr. Darlington, while going to work in Port Harcourt, and allegedly demanded N1 million ransom.
Confirming the arrest on Monday while parading some suspects, Disu said despite getting the information of the incident through Social Media, the Police went into discreet investigations leading to the arrest of the officers.
HE said: “We got the information in the social media. Despite that, we went to work. I’m confirming to you that the officers who were contacted by the boy have been arrested. So I’m waiting for the victim to come forward so that I know what to do. We are not hiding anything here at headquarters.
Reports said criminally-minded police officers intercepted their victim on the road to work at about 8 pm on Friday, December 1. They searched him and found nothing incriminating on him. Not satisfied, they opened his phone and found nothing incriminating as well.
However, while scrolling through his phone the Police officers saw where he was working, and immediately abducted him and forced him to call members of his family to pay N1 million ransom as bail or they would waste him – as they had done to some other victims who refused to cooperate and throw his body into the Choba River.
According to further reports “He was compelled to call his boss, an owner of a hotel in Choba at gunpoint. When his boss was called, he smartly contacted a certain DPO who pretended to be his father.
“The rogue officers unknowingly started negotiating the ransom money with the DPO (names withheld) through the boy’s phone thinking he was the victim’s father.”
Our Correspondent reports that at about 1 am on Saturday, the DPO who pretended to be the young man’s father took his men and met them at Aluu in the bush where the police officers kept the young man expecting to receive the ransom money.
They were immediately disarmed and arrested by the DPO. Shockingly, they came from a Police formation in Port Harcourt town in Borokiri axis very far away from their jurisdiction.