With a friend and barber like 27-year-old Douglas Nweke, Daniel Opiyo, a 17-year-old
who resides in Port Harcourt, Rivers State with his parents now knows he needs
no enemies.
Opiyo on October 28, 2014, got a first hand experience of the meaning of
betrayal, when his neighbour, Nweke, who owns a barbing shop arranged the
abduction of the teenager with the connivance of his wife, Ezinne, 23, and a
three-man gang the couple hired. The evil group then demanded and received N2
million as ransom from Opiyo’s parents before he was released from their
hideout at Ozuoba-NTA Road, Port Harcourt.
As Sunday Sun learnt from the Rivers State Commissioner of Police, Mr Dan
Bature, the kidnap incident exposed a new strategy which the abductors used to
lure the victim to a rented flat, where they held him hostage.
Trouble started for Opiyo when his neighbour and regular barber conceived
the idea of kidnapping him and using the anticipated ransom money to pay his
rent. He got Opiyo’s GSM number and passed it to a member of the gang he hired,
Godwin Samuel, who in turn forwarded it to a female member of the gang,
Emanuella Olusegun, a 300 Level student of Medical Laboratory Science at the
Rivers State University of Science and Technology. With the number Olusegun
called the victim and sweet-talked him into a Facebook relationship.
Bature stated that Nweke, Samuel, Olusegun and David Dokoro, another member
of the gang spent three months strategizing on how to kidnap Opiyo.
At the headquarters of Anti-Kidnapping Squad, AKS, Rivers State Police
Command, where she is being held along with other accomplices, Olusegun
recounted her role. She said: “It was one of our gang members, Godwin Samuel,
who forwarded the phone number of the victim to me. I started chatting with him
on Facebook until we became close friends. On October 28, 2014, I lured the victim
from his house with a promise to give him a treat at an eatery and then took
him to our hideout at Ozuoba where we kept him in a house we rented. The other
members of the gang had tied both of us together so that he would not suspect
me to be a member of the gang. Also, to make him remove his clothes I caressed
him. Both of us were held hostage for six days. The other members of the gang
fed us very well.”
Olusegun who claimed to be an orphan, disclosed that she was given N250,000
as her share of the ransom paid by the family, and complained that she was
cheated in the sharing as she should have been paid N300, 000. Through the
underground information network, the AKS learnt about the disagreement over
the sharing of the ransom. The AKS headed by Supol Edward Shadare then wrote to
the authorities of the RSUST, who disclosed the identity of Olusegun and she
was arrested. The breakthrough facilitated the arrest of Samuel, Nweke, his
wife, Ezinne and Dokoro.
In their own account of what transpired during the period Opiyo was held by
the gang, Samuel and Dokoro told Sunday Sun: “We planned the details of the
kidnapping of the victim. It took us three months. We fed him with rice, bread
and noodles. We are members of the Vikings cult and we had to initiate him by
making him suck our blood the way we do in our cult. After the ransom was paid,
both of us got N320,000 each.”
Typical of most criminal cases, their cookie crumbled and the duo was
arrested at the junction close to the house of one them in Rumosi Port-Harcourt.
Nweke, who could properly be described as Judas, the Barber, disclosed that
Opiyo was released on November 3, 2014, after his father paid N2 million though
they had demanded N10 million from the family. Soon after he got his share,
Nweke gave his wife N120,000 to pay their rent.
Bature said the AKS team in the course of arresting the gang members also
recovered N300, 000, being part of the ransom, one locally made pistol and two
live ammunition.
