By Lucky Isibor,
The Edo State Police Command on Friday paraded 102 suspected criminals, cultists, kidnappers, armed robbers and hoodlums arrested in different parts of the state.
The suspects were arrested for different offences across the State, ranging from cultism, fraud, kidnapping, armed robbery and murder.
The State Commissioner of Police, Mr. Babatunde Kokumo, who paraded the suspects before journalists at the Command headquarters in Benin, advised criminally-minded persons to either repent or relocate to other places, else, they would face the full wrath of the law.
He alleged that many of the suspects who escaped from the long arms of the law in neighbouring States, were caught in Edo following a crack down on criminal hideouts in the State.
“Many of the suspects confessed to the crimes they were accused of, and narrated their level of involvement in the crimes.”
He stated that the suspects are being processed with a view to charging them to court.
Among the suspects paraded was 14-year-old Anna Amos, who was arrested last Wednesday, for the alleged murder of 71-year-old Madam Helen Adodo, a day before, by smashing her head with a stone.
She confessed that she was under a spell saying that the day the incident happened, her mistress asked her to give her another clothes to change into because the ones she was putting on was smeared with kerosene.
She said she hurriedly did that and when she was done with it, she demanded for food and water to bath before she went to bed to sleep.
According to her “There is one of her friends that usually come around and when she comes, she sends me an errand.
“She used to go to native doctor’s house. She comes at night and when she does, she passes the night in our house.
“She asked me to follow her one certain night and I refused. So when we came back, the woman I am staying with asked me to put on the light that was around 12:00am.
“She called me to give her another clothes that the one she is putting on is smelling because of the kerosene that poured on it. She changed into another clothes.
“So I dropped the clothes that has the kerosene on the floor. She later asked me to prepare food and boil water for her to bath.
“So before I came out, her friend has already gone to the native doctor’s house”,
“Some uncontrollable forces came upon me like breeze. So I lost senses of what I was doing.
“I left the dishes I was to wash and went straight to stand on a stone and I later went inside the room where I discovered that my mistress was still sleeping so I hit the stone on her head and she died.
“So, I scratched my head and turned around four times before I regained my sense.
“So when I saw that I have killed her, I held her and started crying in her pool of blood”, she said.
The JSS II Itohan Girls Grammar School student who was brought from Abuja to assist Mrs. Helen Adodo (now deceased) said the spirit warned her not to tell anyone and that if she does, she will die.
The suspect who has barely spent five months in Benin with her mistress said she has never killed anybody before and that she regretted her action.
Also paraded was 26-year-old Wisdom Olocha, an indigene who was accused of capable of opening any locked door after knocking the door with a ring strapped to his finger.
The suspect, who denied opening doors with with rings, however, said he was arrested after breaking into a car and stole a woman’s bag.
Items recovered from the various suspects include laptops, cellphones, undisclosed amount of money, banned drugs, cutlasses, assorted sophisticated arms and ammunitions and locally made cut-to-size guns.
