‘How My Fellow Cult-Members Lured Me Into Crime’ – Suspect

A suspect who worked with kidnappers and is currently cooling off in prison custody, has confessed how he was lured into the crime.

Zigabari Vonu was arrested on November 16, 2018, when it emerged that he had been working with criminals and had been running a racket of supplying lists of influential persons in Rivers State to professional kidnappers who abducted victims and in turn paid him a percentage of the ransom.

His heinous act was exposed after one of his victims, a Customs officer named Justina was abducted on November 11, but the crime was busted five days later by operatives of Intelligence Response Team, IRT.

According to an eyewitness account, a five-man gang kidnapped the victim at a restaurant in Eleme, Port Harcourt, where she was a regular customer. After the abduction––and indeed, over the next few days––no one suspected that Vonu, a waiter in the restaurant, was the brain behind the act. He allegedly arranged with the kidnappers to rough-handle himso as to divert detectives’ attention from him as a suspect should they decide to investigate.

Unfortunately for him, detectives assigned to the case rounded him up with the kidnap gang. It was during interrogation, that the suspects named Vonu as their main source of information regarding whom to kidnap in the area.

As police investigation later revealed, Vonu, had worked in several places in Rivers State, either as a sales boy or a waiter. But in all the places that he had worked, he had always compiled names of wealthy individuals he knew there, and as soon as he was done, he either resigned or caused his employers to sack him. Thereafter, he would turn over his lists to willing kidnap or armed robbery gangs.

His confession

During interrogation at the police station, Vonu, a native of Ogubulo in Rivers State, alleged that his fellow cult members lured him into crime.

“My father abandoned us for another woman. My mother did her best to ensure that all her children went to school, but I had to drop out of school because I found it difficult to understand what I was taught in class. My performance was so bad that our principal recommended that I should drop out. Before then, I had been initiated into a secret cult known as De-gbam. I joined them for the fun of it and to avoid being bullied on the street.

“When I started working as a sales boy, some of my cult members would visit my shop and ask for things on credit. When I refused, they would threaten to rob the shop. I try to dissuade them, but they would still come.

“Initially, I refused to collect anything from them as my share until I realized they were using me to get information. I thought it was easier to become an informant because the offence is lighter and that the court will grant me bail. All I usually do was to give information about a target while they handled the execution.”