Two policemen attached to the Imo State Police Command allegedly went beyond their brief when they connived with another man, who is at large, to rob Mr. Joseph Ogueri of his car at gunpoint.
The act expectedly cut short the joy of Ogueri, a professional welder, who had struggled to save money to purchase the Volkswagen Golf 3 Convertible on December 2, 2014, and was happy that he had joined the club of car owners.
As at the time the act was committed, Ogueri was about to register it.
Piqued by the role played by the policemen, Ogueri in a petition written on his behalf by Barrister Ugonna Ihediwa of Mahatma Chambers to the Imo State Commissioner of Police requested the police boss as well as the Assistant Inspector General of Police in-charge of Zone 9 Command, Umuahia, to investigate the two police officers and bring them to book for armed robbery.
Narrating his sad experience to Sunday Sun, Ogueri, a native of Amachara Avu in Ikeduru Local Government Area of Imo State said that whenever he was not busy at his workshop, he usually augmented his income as a commercial motorcyclist. It was in the course of doing that on March 11, 2015 that a certain man hired him to take him to a place along Naze Road, Owerri, Imo State, where he claimed he wanted to issue a cheque to some landowners in respect of the land that he had acquired for the purpose of mounting a GSM mast. He further revealed that when they got to the place the man paid him off.
“When I closed from the okada business and parked my motorbike and I got into my car which was parked at the Road Safety Junction, Owerri/Egbu road preparatory to going back home, I saw the same man again. As I was about to drive off, he pleaded with me to give him a ride to the hotel where he said he was staying and even said that I should be coming every morning to take him to the project site for the GSM mast.”
Continuing, Ogueri said that, when he got to the hotel the man asked him to wait as he wanted him to take him to somewhere else. At the hotel, the man met two of the policemen who were deployed from Owerri North Police Division as guards.
His words: “When I dropped him at the hotel and wanted to go, the man asked me to wait because he wanted me to take him to somewhere else. Later, he pleaded with me to buy him a padlock with which to secure his bag because according to him, the housekeepers in the hotel always have a spare key to all the rooms. Reluctantly, I went to buy the padlock and when I came back few minutes later, the man was already drinking beer with the two policemen (one of them was a police inspector). He also offered me a bottle of beer which I accepted.”
While they were still drinking, the man took Ogueri’s car key that was on the table, saying that he wanted to pick his colleagues at the Road Safety junction, Egbu Road. But Ogueri refused insisting that he would take the man himself to the junction. Then surprisingly, the police inspector and his colleague ordered him at gunpoint to step aside as both the inspector and the man entered his car and drove off while the other policeman held him hostage at the hotel.
Ogueri said he became alarmed when the police inspector came back to the hotel alone without the man. When he inquired about the man and his car, the inspector claimed that the man left him at Roget Restaurant in Egbu and that he thought he was already back at the hotel.
“It was at this point it dawned on me that the policemen were actually working with the man to rob me of my car because the whole thing was a set up. As a result, I promptly reported the matter at the Owerri North Divisional Police Headquarters but they did not do anything,” Ogueri lamented.
Rather, policemen at the division began extorting money from him in the guise of searching for his car and at the same time conniving with the two police officers, who had actually stolen his car as they were never arrested and have continued to work in the same hotel.
“The following day after my car was stolen, officers of the Owerri North Police Division said that the car had been located at Ore in Ondo State, and when I spoke to the purported policeman at Ore who was identified with my car, the voice sounded exactly like that of the man that colluded with the police inspector at the hotel and his colleague to steal my car. But they insisted that he was a policeman in Ore and requested that I should provide them with N25,000 to go to Ore. I was only able to give them N10,000. But later I discovered that it was all part of the scam because they never went anywhere. It was just a ploy to extort money from me. In fact, one of the officers told me pointblank that the car is gone and that I should forget about it.”
Convinced that the whole incident was a conspiracy by the officers of the Owerri North Police Division who are bent on protecting their colleagues, Ogueri decided to hire a lawyer to petition the Commissioner of Police and the AIG in-charge of Zone 9 Umuahia, to investigate the two police officers and compel them to replace his car.
