Man accuses Lagos policemen of extorting N100,000, after labelling him ‘Yahoo boy’

A Twitter user who simply identified himself as Oluwagbadura has narrated how police officers attached to the divisional headquarters at Soliki, Aguda, Lagos, extorted N100,000 from him after accusing him of being a “Yahoo Boy”.

In a series of tweets, Oluwagbadura said he was stopped by the officers on Thursday afternoon in what he thought was just a routine stop-and-search operation.

“At around 13:45 the Nigerian police stopped me at Soliki Aguda, Lagos, and conducted the usual search,” Oluwagbadura tweeted.

“After NOT finding anything on me, they proceeded to seize my phone and company laptop and tagged me a yahoo boy. My crime, they said, is that I do not have an ID card as a freelancer.

“They searched my phone. They called me a criminal for chatting with my friends on WhatsApp. They threatened to shoot and lock me up!”

Oluwagbadura said the policemen then took him to their station, where they forced him to admit to being a criminal.

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“They then asked me to write a statement and at the end I signed papers to bail myself. I transferred N100,000 to the POS vendor, and then paid N2,000 for charges,” the Twitter user said.

Oluwagbadura said six plain-clothes police officers carried out the act. He went on to say one of the officers, who goes by the name Ojo Ozeigbe, threatened to “deal with him in cell and nothing will happen”.

He also identified one other officer as Abdulkareem Sulaiman.

After he was eventually freed by the men, the Twitter user narrated the harassment he suffered in their hands and solicited help from Nigerians so he could retrieve his N100,000.

“First, thanks to everyone who contributed a tweet! I got my money back COMPLETELY!”, he wrote hours later when the sum extorted from him had been recovered.

FIJ made several phone calls to Benjamin Hundeyin, the police spokesperson for the state, to know whether the police officers mentioned in the matter would face disciplinary actions but they were not answered.

On Friday afternoon, Hundeyin made it known via his official Twitter handle that the Lagos State Police Command had summoned the six policemen to its headquarters in Ikeja.

“The complainant positively identified them all. They have been handed over to the Provost department for appropriate disciplinary measures,” Hundeyin tweeted.