For Sheidu Busari, an armed robbery suspect, spending this year’s Christmas in prisons would be one of his memorable mistakes.
He was arrested by the police alongside four of his cohorts during an operation in the house of a powerful politician in Lagos.
Heavily armed bandits, numbering about four stormed the premises of a frontline politician in Lagos, attracting the attention of the state Commissioner of Police, Umar Manko who promptly ordered the officer in charge of the State Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) Abba Keyari to go after them. Nemesis later caught up with the suspects as the police eventually apprehended them.
Narrating his ordeal, one of the suspects admitted they attacked the politician but not with guns as earlier claimed.
He said: “Really, we attacked the man but the man was too strong to defeat. We used pliers to break the kitchen window protector and gained entry. We started packing his laptop, phones and other things.” “As we were packing his things, the man woke up and grabbed me. He was too strong for me to handle, so he started beating me. He did not stop at hitting me. He bit me, his teeth were very sharp. He was biting me like a wounded lion. In fact, that man is a lion. He is too powerful. As he was hitting and biting me, I was shouting for help but my colleagues abandoned me. “How I managed to escape, I cannot tell. I was half dead when I left the house.
If the man had beaten me more than he did, I would have died. He is too strong so, that is why I am saying no to the claim by the police that we were armed, if we had a gun, we would have fired him, rather we escaped from him.”
Showing some wounds on his body, he said, “look at my body, all the injuries were from the man. He even injured me on my penis. He beat me black and blue.”
The police claimed that a locally made pistol was recovered from him, but he denied: “I am not saying that I don’t have a gun at home, I have but I don’t use it for robbery. I only use it to protect myself at home. For that robbery, I swear to my ancestors, we did not use gun that day.”
One of his gang members, Sheidu Busari, suspected to be the leader of the gang, said, “we did not use gun that day but my friend Jimo has a gun, but we did not go with it that fateful day. We only used big pliers to break through the window.
We gained entry but when the man grabbed Jimo, and he was shouting like a baby, I thought the man has stabbed him or had charmed him so I took to my heels. I did not know it was ordinary biting that was scaring Jimo. Jimo (Jamio) used to be strong that was why I was confused and scared when he was crying like a baby.”
The suspect who just regained freedom from the prisons, claimed, “I was only sent to prison for buying a stolen phone but my elder brother later bought my freedom with N200,000.”
Asked why he went back to the same crime he said, “Don’t you know that Christmas is fast approaching? I need money for Christmas so, when we got information that the man we attacked was wealthy, I had no alternative than to go for the robbery.”
Busari lamented that the operation did not yield any fruit. “I swear, the robbery was a bad one. We did not make money, yet, it brought another trouble to me. See now, I will be spending the Christmas in prison.”
Confirming their arrest, Lagos State PPRO, Ngozi Braide, said items recovered from them include, one locally-made pistol with six rounds of live cartridges, one HP Laptop, and one Nokia 200.
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