Nemesis caught up with three electricity transformer cable thieves in Era Town, when the community’s volunteer group, keeping night watch in the wee hours of upper Friday (May 8) morning in the Oto-Awori Local Council Development Area, apprehended the vandals before they could carry out their nefarious acts.
Our correspondent learnt that the thieves, who gave their names as Henry Reuben, Eze Obiesi and Chika Okpara, were with industrial spanners, pliers and a push-truck with which they planned to loosen and cart away the power connecting cables, if they had succeeded.
However, their luck ran out when a member of the vigilante group was pressed by nature and had to go into a nearby bush to defecate. His sudden interruption spooked one of the thieving gang, who had been lying low and waiting for the appropriate time to commence their plans.
When the hoodlum took to his heels, the watchman raised the alarm and subsequently alerted other members of his group. They dutifully gave chase and apprehended the three-man gang at about 1.30am.
When quizzed, the leader of the thieves, Eze Obiesi, confessed that this was not their first visit to the town, saying that they were the same gang that vandalized and carted away the cables that connected one of the community’s transformers to the power grid, about a week earlier.
In confirming the gang’s confessions, the leader of the watchmen group, Mr. Amodu Saminu, disclosed that “before the arrests, the community’s youths were prime suspects in the cable vandalisation issue. But with these arrests, however, the youths have been exonerated.”
One of the suspected vandals, Henry Reuben, revealed that the cables earlier stolen from one of the transformers were sold off at N5, 000 per metre, fetching about N300, 000 for cables worth almost 700,000 at N10, 500 per metre. “I was given N40, 000 from a total booty of N130, 000.”
The suspects are now helping the police in their investigations, and some of the earlier stolen cables have been recovered.
