Rivers police arrest four officers for extorting varsity student

Rivers State Police Command. Photo/thewill

Rivers State Police Command, yesterday, arrested and detained four officers attached to its Puff Adder tactical unit for allegedly extorting N204,000 from one Kingsley Dike, a 200-level student of Ignatius Ajuru University.

The State Commissioner of Police (CP), Eboka Friday, ordered their arrest, after a civil rights group, Centre for Basic Rights Protection and Accountability Campaign led the victim to lodge a formal complaint at the commissioner’s office on Monday.

Confirming this development, a lawyer with the rights group, Charles Obiorah Edward commended the CP for the steps he took on the matter.

Edward urged the commissioner to ensure that a thorough investigation was carried into the matter and to arraign any officer found culpable in court to serve as a deterrent to others.

Narrating his ordeal, Dike explained that he was on his way home last Friday at about 10:00p.m. in a bolt,  a car-hiring service, when some policemen stopped the vehicle and brought him down.

Dike said after a search was conducted on him and his fellow students, the policemen still took them to their base in Aluu, notwithstanding that nothing incriminating was found on them.

He said when they to the station, the officers ordered him to remove the code on his phone, they went through the phone and found nothing.

He further explained that the officers detained them in the cell on Friday night and brought them out on Saturday morning.

According to him, the officers coerced them to write in their statements that they were internet fraudsters.
Dike said they wrote they were internet fraudsters, out of fear of being killed, after which the police officers gave them an account number, which they transferred N204,000 to, before they were released on Saturday.

At press time, the affected officers are being detained at the State Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Department (SCIID), Port Harcourt, while the money allegedly extorted from the students has been recovered.