COMMUTERS plying Lagos-Ibadan and Benin expressways now do so at the risk of their lives as highway patrol men who are posted to these routes to safeguard lives and property have resorted to abandoning their duty posts for reasons best known to them.
Investigations have shown that an average of six vehicles are daily robbed by men of the underworld along these highways. City Scope gathered that these robbers who attack their victims with impunity, adopts several strategies in carrying out their nefarious act following their knowledge of the non-presence of policemen at the various black spots, especially at night. Some of the tactics includes, wearing police uniforms and using touch lights to flag down motorists while pretending to be carrying out routine checks; only to pounce on their preys and dispossess them of their valuables including cash. Others strategy simply involves planting grasses on the middle of the roads and burying in between the grasses nails and other tyre-piercing objects.
City Scope was told that this tactics stem from the fact that motorists would normally break to a halt on sighting these strange objects on the road; that is if their tyres are not punctured before getting to the spot.
Areas mostly susceptible are Ibafon village very close to the Redeemed Christian Church of God redemption camp, a spot immediately after Shagamu toll gate, few kilometer after Ijebu-Ode toll gate, Ore bridge, and Okada town shortly before entering Benin city. Those who have suffered most in the hands of these unscrupulous elements of the society are luxury bus and circulation drivers who normally leave Lagos at night for other states conveying passengers to their various destinations and circulating newspapers to other states respectively.
Some of them who shared their ordeal with City Scope lamented the impunity with which they were constantly attacked and dispossessed of their belongings without police presence. �What we see every night in the hands of these robbers is better experienced than told. Immediately you leave Lagos state approaching Ijebu Ode, may be between 8.00 to 9.30pm, you will see grasses put on the middle of the road. If you are not careful, you will apply brake immediately and the rest will be history. And sometimes, in between the grasses there are nails and other objects that are capable of puncturing tyres. The most surprising thing is that some of these robbers are in police uniforms and are wielding touch lights which they normally use in flagging you to a halt. Because they are in uniforms, you are compelled to stop only for them to bring out their guns and announce to you that they are armed robbers. And there is nothing to do than to surrender.
One of us had asked one day that why they were not robbers but policemen but they shouted him down and hit him with the but of their gun. Sometimes when we experience such attack, we normally drive to either Ijebu Ode or Ore police station as the case my be; but the policemen on duty will always find one excuse or the other to give us. And at the end of the day we resign to our fate. In some instance, the armed robbers have had to warn us to be carrying enough money on us other than the fuel allowance or be killed,� chorused the victims.
Frantic efforts by City Scope to get the reaction of the Inspector-General of Police, Mr. Sunday Ehinderor, on the matter failed. But an inside sources revealed on phone that similar reports had reached the table of the police IG adding that the Commissioner of Police in charge of Federal Highway Patrol have been mandated to take up the task of restoring peace back on our highways, especially at night.
According to sources, several prominent men had petitioned the IGP claiming that most of the robberies were masterminded by the policemen themselves going by the manner they are usually attacked.