From Molly Kilete, Abuja
It was the end of the road for a gang of trans-border car thieves, who specialised in stealing cars from Nigeria and taking them out of the country, using valid travelling documents and car jammers to evade arrest from police and immigration officers.
The group who have been in the deadly business for over five years now say they operate in Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Chad and are usually armed with master keys, guns, knives, dangerous weapons, genuine ECOWAS brown card, and two car jammers, among other .
With the jammers, they say they are able to block all communication network and prevent the vehicle from being tracked from the security installed in them and use the ECOWAS travelling documents to gain entry into the country of their choice without attracting suspicion from the immigration officers at the border.
The gang members, who have been on the wanted list of the police for sometime now, were arrested by men of the Inspector General of Police Response Team.
In this interview, the leader of the gang told Sunday Sun, that most of the second-hand vehicles popularly known as “tokunbo” at some of the car shops are actually stolen vehicles.
He confessed that while they steal vehicles from Nigeria to ECOWAS countries, sell them and steal cars from those countries, drive them to Nigeria and sell them so as not to be detected by their owners.
The suspect, Suleiman Musa, said that they just don’t go after any car, but the very posh ones to enable them dispose them fast.
He said that they sell the vehicles between N800,000 to N2 million depending on the grade and so as not to waste too much time keeping them in their custody.
In this interview, Suleiman who said he has always been in the robbery business spoke about how he graduated into trans-border crime.
His words: “My name is Suleiman Musa, I am from Kastina State. I have been a bad boy since I was small because i used to follow bad boys then in our village and they taught me how to steal. We used to steal provision from people’s shop in the village and broke into their houses to steal money and other things.
“I left the village with my friends when I was 13, and we continued stealing and doing other bad things till we met someday who introduced us into this trans-border car stealing about six years ago and I found out that it was very lucrative than the petty robbery that we were doing.
“When we first started, they took time to train us each time we go for operation on how they identify good cars, steal them from where they are parked or at gunpoint and what to do thereafter.”
On how they operate, he said: “We like to attack these car owners at gunpoint and make them drive the vehicles for some minutes or hours to make them demobilize the security and there after, we push them out of the vehicle. If they are lucky, they get injured if they don’t, they die in the process and we move on.
“Apart from getting our victims on the road, we also go to very busy places like shopping centres, banking premises, churches, mosques, markets, big eateries to operate. We go to these places with master keys which we use to open the car. But sometimes if we don’t want to attract suspicion, we go under the vehicle to open the bonnet and remove the battery before opening the doors. As soon as we open the vehicle, we will then turn on our Jamming device, fix the battery head and drive the vehicle to a safe place and from there we will wait until it is safe for us to drive out of Abuja.
“We bought the anti-tracking device through a popular online shop and they delivered it to us here in Abuja, while we got the ECOWAS travelling documents from the immigration office in abuja.
“We have stolen plenty of cars that I have lost count because apart from stealing cars from Nigeria, we also steal from Niger and Cameroon. For example, we don’t and cannot sell cars that was stolen here in Nigeria. We usually take them out to these countries that I have mentioned and sell them there. We only sell the cars we stole from those countries here in Nigeria that way the owners cannot locate them. Sometimes we sell the cars to car dealers so some of the cars you see on car stands which they call tokunbo are not tokunbo cars, they are stolen vehicles, we have a way of getting fake documents to give to our buyers and most of them know they are stolen vehicles because we sell them cheap.”
On why they resorted to using a jamming device as one of their operating tools, Suleiman said: “We use the car jammers to facilitate easy movement of these cars and prevent them being detected especially those that have trackers installed in them. With the jammers, we are able to block all investigative skills of the police and keep them in darkness until we get to our destination. As soon as we turn on these jamners we are able to block all forms of cellular, Bluetooth, wireless, satellite phones, and WiFi transmissions and makes it impossible for the security agencies to track the stolen cars. We also make it difficult for the people who installed the security on the vehicle and we only turn it off when we get to where we are going to and remove the battery head.”