No fewer than 12 female suspects have been arrested by the police in Lagos and Bauchi states over various crimes, following painstaking investigations.
While some of the arrested female suspects were caught napping at the scenes of crime, others were simply implicated by gang members, who provided the necessary hints that led to their arrest.
Police authorities in Lagos and Bauchi states told The Point that they had been on the trail of some of the female suspects for over a year. It was gathered that it took the combined efforts of other security agents to co-ordinate the needed intelligence networks that paved the way for the arrest of the female suspects.
In the robbery operations that involved the duo of Kafilat and Blessing Alloyous, the suspects were caught unawares by the police. The two ladies were said to be keeping arms for their partners-in-crime, who took to their heels when the police came calling.
“At their armoury in Sango Otta, Ogun State, several arms and ammunition were recovered by officers from the Lagos State Special AntiRobbery Squad. That was following a surprise raid on their criminal hide out,” a source said. The source further said that the two female suspects confessed to the crime during interrogation.
“We are victims of extreme poverty. We thought we could do this to make ends meet. Now, we have reached the end of the road,” one of the female robbery suspects, Kafilat, said during interrogation. The leader of the gang, one Segun, described by the police as a criminal with a dozen of identities, was a step ahead of the detectives who caught him six months after he first escaped.
Only last week was Maryam Musa, 27, sentenced to six months imprisonment by a Bauchi Chief Magistrate’s Court after pleading guilty as charged by the police. Musa, a mother of two, was a member of a motorcycle snatching syndi cate that was smashed by the police after a diligent investigation.
She was initially paraded by the police in Bauchi before her arraignment in court. Shortly before her arraignment at Court IV, along with the other members of her gang, she had told The Point that she was a widow and innocent of the crime. The charges brought against the members of her gang ranged from criminal conspiracy, theft of five motorcycles, receiving stolen property to being in possession of stolen property.
Late last year, a woman dressed in an Army camouflage at Ikorodu, Lagos, was said to have led a gang of armed robbers, who attacked three commercial banks and carted away unspecified huge sums of money. The attack led to the death of two persons.
Those who witnessed the attack said that the woman wearing the Army camouflage was armed with two guns and took position to issue out directives to her gang while the operation lasted. The Lagos State Commissioner of Police, Mr. Fatai Owoseni, said it was a civic responsibility of all citizens to report the activities of the criminal elements within the society to the security agencies.
Owoseni stated that the police should not be seen as magicians, adding that since most of the criminals lived within their neighbourhoods, exposing them would go a long way in reducing the level of criminality in the society.
In the past six months, according to findings, no fewer than six female suspected armed robbers had been placed on the police wanted list, while four persons have lost their lives to the nefarious activities of these women of the underworld.
The Lagos State Police Command image-maker, Superintendent Dolapo Badmos, in a chat with The Point, said, “Female involvement in criminal activities nowadays is on the rise”. Badmos said that some of the female suspects would simply play the role of an accomplice or directly lead a criminal gang.
She warned that the long hand of the law would not spare anyone caught in the web of criminal activities. The police spokesperson added, “In the past, criminal activities might slightly be on the rise, but that tide had been stemmed down with the pro-active measures put in place by officers and men of the command”.
Meanwhile, a retired Assistant Inspector General of Police in-charge of Zone 2, Mr. Balla Hassan, has revealed that “armed robbery, anywhere in the world, is viewed as a serious offence, not only against the victim and his property, as the case may be, but also against the state. It is a sort of crime that every sane society repulses partly because of the psychological agonies the victims usually undergo, if only they survive after the encounter that is always bloody in nature. The retired police top brass said that the changes in the society seemed to have influenced women nowadays as they struggled to compete freely with their male counterparts in almost all spheres of life.
“The dictum seems to be that, what a man can do, a woman can do better. This axiom might have been the guiding light for the new generation of women, who today take to criminal enterprise; hence, their involvement in armed robbery and its twin brother called kidnapping”, he said.
