How Police Officers Extorted N405,000 From Us After Falsely Accusing Us Of Being Cult Members — University Student

Yeiyah Samuel, a student at the University of Lagos (UNILAG), has narrated how operatives at Adeniji Police Station in Lekki, Lagos, extorted him and his friends to the tune of ₦405,000, according to SaharaReporters.

According to Samuel, he was in a private car alongside a man and two ladies, heading to a beach in Lekki around 11 p.m. on Tuesday when armed police officers stopped them at CMS Bus Stop.

In his narration to FIJ, he stated that he parked the car and they all presented themselves for a search on the orders of the officers.

He said an officer had pointed his gun at the team of friends and cocked it even before the search began. He added that while the search was on, the officers asked questions regarding their identities.

Samuel said he had identified himself as a UNILAG student while his male friend identified himself as a student of Yaba College of Technology (YABATECH). But it did not matter, as one of the officers ordered them into a police shuttle.

“When I entered the shuttle, I met two men and a woman. The driver drove the seven of us to the police station. At the station, they went through our phones but found no exhibit in them, yet they framed us for cultism.

“They collected everything with us, locked me and the other men in the cell and freed our female friends. If anyone tried to talk, they’d slap them. In the cell, the folks we met stripped us and began to beat us. We slept there.”

He further said at 7 am the following day, one of the officers approached him and said he and his male friend would not have accepted to sleep in the cell if they were not cultists. 

An officer then asked them what they would offer to regain freedom. They offered ₦100,000.

“They said the least they would accept from us was N1 million. One of them then said we should pay N300,000 after we pleaded. But another officer asked us to pay N400,000 instead.

“The two guys with a woman they arrested along with us were invited to pay N640,000. They told one of them to transfer N640,000 to my account because none of them had an ATM.”

When the transaction was successful, an officer accompanied Samuel to a POS shop close to the Adeniji Police Station, where they withdrew N405, 000 and the N640,000 earlier transferred into his account.

After the payment, he was presented with a bail form and was asked to write a statement as though he was in the police station that morning to bail four people.

“They finally gave us our phones when we had paid. By 11 a.m. on Wednesday, they saw us off to where our car was parked and bade us goodbye,” he said.