Two impostors, Okoh Patrick (48) and Aniekan Emmanuel (32) have been arrested by operatives of the Special Anti Robbery Squad (SARS) of the Lagos State Police Command for allegedly leading a six-man robbery gang whose members paraded themselves as highway traffic task officials in order to hijack and divert trucks conveying petroleum products. Patrick, a 48-year-old native of Iselukwu, Delta State, was said to have paraded himself as a combatant soldier while Emmanuel, an indigene of Rivers State, claimed he was a merchant naval officer.
Four other suspected mebers of the gang arrested by SARS include Alex Ogbu Ugbuagu, a 35-year old native of Abakaliki, Ebonyi State; Izuchukwu Udeagwu, a 36-year-old native of Umudioka town in Dunukofia Local Government Area, Anambra State; Thirty-nine-year-old Evans Boniface from Mbano, Imo State and forty-eight-year-old Taiwo Oyadara from Ikirun, Osun State. The syndicate was said to have been smashed by SARS during its fifth operation.
The first operation, according to a police source, occurred in August 2013 when one Alex Ugbuagu and Boniface connived with one Alloy and one Kazeem to hijack a truck at gunpoint. They allegedly diverted the truck to a filling station in Ikorodu between 3 am and 4 am while the victim driver of the truck has remained in the hospital since then.
In the second operation, the gang allegedly snatched a PMS truck between Ijora and Apapa, Lagos in March 2014 and sold the content worth about N3 million to a filling station in Ajah, Lagos for N1.3 million.
The third operation occurred at Iyana Oworo, Lagos where they hijacked a truck conveying diesel and sold it to a filling station in Ikorodu while the fourth operation involved a truck containing diesel, which was snatched at gunpoint around Toyota bus-stop along the Apapa-Oshodi Expressway on July 18, 2014.
The fifth operation was said to have occurred also in Lagos on July 21 when they snatched a truck containing petrol on its way to Sango-Ota, Ogun State. The police source said that luck ran out on the gang after their fifth operation.