Tag: Kidnap

In the dead of a December night last year, four kidnap suspects awaiting trial woke up from their cell at the Okere Prisons in Warri, Delta State. Quietly they broke through the ceiling and landed down into the open courtyard of the prison. From there they managed to scale the nearly 100-feet high electric fence and jumped down into the dark night and the waiting arms of freedom.

Revelations afterwards have shown that the escape was not so straight forward as that. An alleged foreplay between the escapees and the prison official that climaxed in the drama of that night remains an interesting subject of debate within, not just within security circles in the state, but among curious civilians and purveyors of rumour in the area.

The works of investigators who have tried to deconstruct the audacious escape were hampered by the lack of eyewitness. They have merely relied on scrap of information gathered from the thin trail left behind by the escapees – bits and pieces of broken blocks, ceiling, tattered ropes, sharp and blank objects. The suspects were far gone, possibly out of the state, before the staff on duty woke up from their slumber to see what had happened.

Niger Delta Report’s hope that the mystery had been solved necessitated a visit to the facility on Monday, over a month after the incident. But the silence of official and prisoners alike was as deafening as the morning after. The officers in charge of the prison, Mr Emma Omiede, a Deputy Comptroller of Prison refused to speak with our reporter. He said he had nothing to say about the incident and referred our reporter to the State headquarters of the service.

The Delta Command Police Public Relations Officer, DSP Celestine Kalu, who was contacted by our reporter, said: “I don’t know anything about prison break; you should ask the prisons official.”

one of the soldiers deployed to the area after the incident said the story surrounding the jailbreak was “very fascinating and confusing. It is the stuff that movies are made off. When we were younger we watched films like ‘Bangkok Hilton’ and recently ‘Prison Break’ and I tell you this is the closest to those films.

“The reason this is really interesting is the height of the wall that the prisoners scaled. What you see from the outside is even shorter than what it is from the inside because the inside of the prison is set on a lower ground. How they still managed to climb and come down on the other side is what makes it more interesting.”

Our source who craved anonymity, said the warders on duty that night later explained that after breaking out of their cells, the suspects made a long rope out of bed sheets and any other clothing items they could lay their hands on. With the rope, they made several futile attempts to climb out into freedom. The bits of ropes they left behind for bewildered prison officials told only a part of the story.

Undeterred by the failure of the Tarzan routine, the felons were believed to have devised a more successful means: Using bundles of firewood, bricks and other available objects, they built a pile high enough to help them scale the high wall. The task, which could have taken up to two hours, was done without any of the guards on duty getting wind of it. By the morning the four alleged kidnappers who were arrested for the abduction of the son of a prominent politician in the state, had successfully escaped.

Looking at the prison walls from the Okere Road, as this reporter did, it was difficult to comprehend how dozens of security operatives, including soldiers and mobile policemen on an Armoured Personnel Carrier and their colleagues from the NPS, slumbered away while those they were meant to guard escaped out of the Okere Federal Prison in Warri.

“The feat achieved by the suspects is almost unmanageable and the story is too good to be real,” a resident of neighbouring Oki street told our reporter.

The circumstance of the escape gets even more implausible, considering that security was beefed up around Federal Prisons in the country in the wake of recent attacks by Boko Haram Islamic set on such facilities and other incidents involving the Okere Prisons in recent times.

Our investigation revealed that the incident was the second break from the heavily secured prison in barely three years. It would be recalled that a couple of prisoners escaped from the prison in July 2011, by blowing up a hole through the prison wall with suspected IED (improvised explosive device).

That incident was followed by a daring attack on prison warders conveying suspected members of a kidnap ring to the court for trial. The suspected who successfully broke free were members of a gang alleged led by the notorious Kelvin Ibruvwe. The smash-and-grab operation was carried out in March 2013, two warders and at least four other persons were killed in that incident.

None of these incidents above match the derring-do of the absconders of the December night prison break and none of the stories match it either in terms of the intricacy of plot or the fairytale ending. while all but a couple of the dozens that escaped in 2011 were arrested, the four men who slipped out of the ‘Okere High College’, as some residents of the city refer to the corrective facility, are yet to be found.

There are suspicions of collaboration by some workers at the prison, particularly why the suspects were allowed to live in a cell that made it easier for them to escape. A retired staff of the prisons expressed surprised at how easily the prisons escaped, and also hinted that there was possible connivance with warders either on or off duty at the time of the break.

“The cells that were supposed to be kept would have made it near impossible for them to contemplate or even successfully hatch the escape plan. This is because for one, the cell due them would have been one of the most secured cells considering the enormity of their alleged crime and the maximum sentence,” our source added.

Our findings further revealed that some officials of the Nigerian Prisons Service (NPS) attached to the prison usually collect gratifications from crime suspects and those awaiting trial and in return allot to them choice cells and undue privileges such as the use of GSM telephone, meals cooked specially for them.

A former prisoner there told our reporter, “It is like a hotel; when you pay a certain amount of money, there are certain facilities and privileges that you are entitled to. This might not be the same as those who merely pay for the basic amenities in the hotel. So, although all prisons are equal, some are more equal than others.”

Our source who asked not to be named to avoid stigmatization, revealed some prisoners live like royalty in detention. He said a very notorious thug who was in the prison for several years was so comfortable within the facility that ran his private businesses and executed more crimes from detention.

“The man (names withheld) one of the notorious hoodlums from Uvwie area of the state. He was allowed regular visit by his girlfriends and other family members and he made telephone calls to top politicians and about anybody.”

Meanwhile, in response to the incident, the prison authority and security operative in the state have thrown a very suffocating security ring around the infamous prison. A blockade, about 500km long, covers the entrance to the prison. The busy Okere Road has been closed to traffic from Essi Junction to the Robert Road U-Turn point. Traffic flow onward Okere Post Office is restricted to a single lane on the other side of the road, much to the chagrin of angry residents and motorists who are forced to sluice through the available single-lane are fuming silently. A taxi driver likened the situation to “shutting the gate when the goat had already escaped.”