Posted by By JULIANA FRANCIS on
The police in Lagos have dashed the dreams of three youngsters who posed as assassins in a bid to dupe a wealthy businesswoman of N1.5 million.
The police in Lagos have dashed the dreams of three youngsters who posed as assassins in a bid to dupe a wealthy businesswoman of N1.5 million.
In a plot reminiscent of scenes from thriller movies, the young men sent threat letters to their victim asking her to follow their instruction or she would die.
But they couldn't go far with their formula for making money before they fell into police trap.
Wasiu Olatundun, Seun Popoola and Adegoke Akinola, all in their early 20s, were said to have ganged up to write the threat letters, which the scared woman decided to give to the police at the State Criminal Investigations Department (SCID) Panti, in Lagos.
It took detectives a 48-hour surveillance, at a spot where the bad guys had asked the woman to drop the money, before they could be caught.
The detectives had stashed a bag with pieces of paper covered with naira notes and sent a woman to carry the money in a car to the area where the assassins had told their victim to drop it. But the surveillance team had to be patient as no one showed up to pick the bag until the second day.
The suspects who turned out to be persons close to their victim spoke with Daily Sun at the Police Public Relations office in Lagos Wednesday.
Hamzat, who was identified as the closest person to the businesswoman among the suspects, was fingered as the person that engineered the plot.
Olatundun, who is an apprentice to a plank seller, said he played along with Hamzat because he needed money to travel out of the country.
Disclosing the content of the threat letter, Popoola, who drafted it, said: "I started with, Hello Ma. I told her that we needed N1.5 million from her. I wrote that if she fails, we would kidnap her. And we signed the letter with the name Don.
"We went to her place at night. We gave the letter to a little boy to pass it to herElectric shock: 20,000 to lose jobs in NEPA."
Also included in the letter was a phone number, which the boys told the woman to use in reaching them.
Akinola in his own confession said: "Wasiu led me into this problem. He told me that he needed charms to collect some money from his sister. He said the sister had money but she had been very stingy. I had a Jazz which my father gave me for protection against accidents. It could also do other things. It has a pin. You simply pin it to your cloth and it would start working."
Plans went awry when Olatundun tried to get to where the money was placed before his friends.
When he approached the lady who had brought the money, she asked him to hand over the woman's picture that was with the gang. And as he was trying to play smart, the policewoman pressed teargas in his eyes. He fled but the surveillance team caught him.
Detectives told Daily Sun that the suspects had also duped the woman of N600,000 last year.