Mr. Dan Okoro, an Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP), officer in charge of Area ‘E’ with headquarters in Festac, who disclosed this yesterday, said failure to do so would attract severe consequence. He spoke when Mr. Tony Onyima, ManagingDirector/Editor-in-Chief of The Sun Publishing Ltd visited him in his office. Cynthia Osokogu, 24, who was a post-graduate student of Nasarawa State University, Keffi had reportedly left Abuja in late July 2012 to purchase new stock for her fashion outlet but was killed by her Facebook friends who were arraigned in a Magistrate Court on a holden charge last Monday.
The duo of Echezona Nwabufor, 33, and Ezekiel Nnechuwu Olisa Eloka, 23, in their confessional statements revealed how they drugged and strangled the daughter of a retired Major General in a bid to steal her money.ACP Okoro who led that team the cracked the riddle over the murder of Ms. Osokogwu in a hotel room in FESTAC said he would leave no stone unturned to ensure the order to hotel owners to install CCTV is complied with.
“I am going to visit them (hotel owners). I would visit them. It is not just enough to open hotels and enjoy patronage without putting in place adequate security for the lives and propertyof the clients. They must plan for it,’ he emphasized. He noted that if the owner of the hotel where Cynthia was murdered had failed to install CCTV, tracking the suspects would have been a Herculean task.
“If the man hadn’t done so, we would have been in a mess, because identifying the people would have been a major task. The fact that there was CCTV footage, proved quite useful. Apart from the call log that we were working on, there wouldn’thave been anything- at least, a pictorial evidence- that would narrow it down to the fact that these are the people who left thehotel,” he said. Apparently to underscore his seriousness,
ACP Okoro said anybody who failed to comply would not only be treated as a non-conformist, but as an accessory to crime. Before her fatal trip to Lagos, Cynthia had reportedly been chatting with some new “friends” on Facebook for a few months. In the course of their conversations, they had developed friendship and some level of trust.
The accused who paid for Cynthia’s flight ticket and her hotel accomondation as well were believed to have picked her up from the airport and drove her to a hotel in Festac. At the hotel, they tied her up, robbed her of all the money she brought to shop for her business and strangled her to death.
They then left the hotel and quickly deleted her from their Facebook friend list to remove any trace of their connection. Butwith the aid of CCTV from the hotel, the accused who reportedly specialised in luring unsuspecting young women, robbing them of their possessions before killing them were nabbed. Mr. Onyima said he decided to pay a courtesy visit onACP Okoro, being the new helmsman in charge of the Area ‘E’ Command.
“As a newspaper, we’re interested in deepening our content and adding value to what the police is doing in order to help achieve their objective,” he said. He later presented a copyof ‘Nigeria’ Golden Book’, a commemorative publication by The Sun Publishing Ltd to mark the nation’s 50th anniversary, and lauded the officers and men of the command for cracking the Osokogu murder puzzle, which he described as ‘milestone breakthrough.’
Source: Daily Sun
As edited, formatted and published by 'Ucheonye Nzubechi
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