The Ogun State Police Command has arrested a suspected kidnapper, Christopher Yaro, said to have allegedly participated in the abduction of two Catholic priests for ransom in Pankshin, Plateau State, on February 1, 2024.
The spokesperson for the command, Omolola Odutola, who made this known to PUNCH Metro on Tuesday, said the suspect was nabbed on Monday by police operatives in the Ago-Iwoye area of the state.
The two Catholic priests, Father Kenneth Kanwa and Father Jude Nwachukwu, were reportedly abducted from St. Vincent de Paul Fier Parish in the Diocese of Pankshin in Plateau State.
The alleged abductors, who were later discovered to be members of the same parish, allegedly demanded N25m ransom from family and other church members to secure the priests’ freedom.
After a week of the abduction, the chairman of the Plateau State chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria, Polycarp Lubo, though could not confirm whether a ransom was paid, reportedly confirmed the release of the priests.
Speaking on the arrest on Tuesday, Odutola explained that one of the suspects and also a member of the church, Yaro, claimed that he fled Pankshin over fear that members of the community might attack him after they discovered that he was involved in the abduction of the two priests.
She said, “At about 4:25pm on Monday, we received intelligence that a kidnapping suspect, Christopher Yaro, had escaped to Ijebu-Ode after he was alleged to have conspired with another member of the church and five other men to kidnap the two Rev. Fathers in the Pankshin area of Plateau State.
“The suspects were with four K.2 rifles when they carried out the crime. Yaro has been arrested. Further information will be made available to the public as soon as the investigation is completed.”
Speaking in a telephone interview on Tuesday, a security expert in peace, security, and development, Dr. Wale Ismail, advised the Federal Government to develop a multi-level policing across all layers of security to stop suspects from evading justice.
He said, “The issue of arresting a kidnapping suspect in another state is not new, and it’s generally one of the major flaws of policing and security in Nigeria. The big solution to this and other major security challenges in Nigeria is co-policing, or multi-layered policing.
“Having federal policing alongside state and community policing and then opening up and expanding the private security market. Nigeria can never be overpoliced, and it is better to be overpoliced than underpoliced anyway.”
Also, a security analyst and the managing partner at Chive-GPS, Nnamdi Chife, said the government should digitise the country’s security architecture, which would make it difficult for a suspect to flee the community where he was alleged to have committed a crime.
“For them to have arrested the guy, it showed that there are some structures in place for active collaboration among the security agencies. What they need now is to digitise the operation in such a way that a suspect can no longer escape from one state to another.
“For instance, if it happens in Abuja, all Abuja needs to do is to update the details of the suspect and issue bulletins across all its outposts. With this, suspects will no longer find it easy to escape from one state to another”, Chife stated.
