Suspected robbers who carried out an all-night raid on the country home of Colonel Liman Egbe Adulugba, (retd) in Opialu Village in Okpokwu LGA of Benue State last Sunday have abandoned the car in which they carted his personal belongings at Otukpo. Otukpo is roughly 20 kilometers from Opialu, although it is not a straight forward route map.
Intervention was told by an eye witness that the luxury Sienna was cited parked near the Post Office in Otukpo yesterday evening and has been picked up by the Police in the area. It was its empty self, meaning that, unless the Police put the heat on the suspected robbers, the laptop, the refrigerators, the generating set and similar personal items might be gone. Speculations are rife that the car must have been abandoned because a car is very easily traceable, even if parked in one place although others are saying it might be that the police are hot on the heels of the suspects. Yet, others say the robbers probably only needed the car to get away with their loot.
The abandonment of the car at Otukpo suggests that the robbers did not exit Opialu Village through Okpoga/Ugbokolo nor through Ojapo/Eke/Otukpo but took the Okpoga/Utonkon to Otukpo where the chance of any encounter with the Police was least at that hour.
The raid on Adulugba’s house has remained the subject of folk Sociology since Sunday afternoon when Intervention first reported the story. The robbery speaks to the insecurity crisis in rural Nigeria, indicating the loss of the status of ‘Gardens of Eden’ that made village life inviting in the days gone by to a den of serpentine mischief, skulduggery and sundry threats. Vigilantes have sprung up everywhere in most communities, with imponderable consequences for real harmony if emerging stories of the capacity for arbitrariness and impunity are anything to go by. Yet, the trust deficit between the people and the police remains a huge gap to be filled. The solutions are slow in coming and arrive ‘too little, too late’ most of the time. It is puzzling in a world in which technology and security have merged to make some of these challenges ancient problems in most societies.
