A suspect has narrated how he helped the late billionaire kidnapper, Collins Ezenwa, popularly known as E-money, to kidnap many rich people from the South-East, especially in Imo and Abia states.
The suspect identified as Ifeanyi Asiegbuelam, 32, who was arrested by the Police in Cross River state, lamented that despite aiding Ezenwa “E-Money” in his kidnapping and other crimes, he left him poor.
In January 2018, dismissed police corporal, Ezenwa was killed in a gun battle with policemen alongside two other gang members after he attempted kidnapping a South-African-based Nigerian businessman in Owerri.
Asiegbuelam, who has been handed over to IRT operatives, claimed he met E-money, five years before he joined the Nigeria Police Force. He said they were both motorcycle operators in Owerri before E-money joined the police.
He said, “Few years into the trade, I met E-money in Owerri and he was also an okada rider at the time. E-money and I became very close friends.
“We did the job for five years before he joined the police. He asked me to join him but I told him I had no school certificate. He went ahead to join the police and started driving police vehicles around Owerri.”
Asiegbuelam said after a while, he stopped seeing E-money in town and that later in 2017, he heard that E-money had travelled out of the country.
He said, “But a few weeks later in the same year, he showed up in my house in a dark-tinted Toyota Prado SUV, and there he invited me to join his kidnapping enterprise. On the first operation I went with him, we drove to Okigwe, where we kidnapped a man in his car.
“We accosted the vehicle and dragged the man out of the vehicle and took him into our own vehicle; then we zoomed off. E-money then asked me to blindfold the victim and when we got close to my town, E-money asked to come down from his SUV and he gave me N50,000. I didn’t question him and he drove the man away. I didn’t know where he took the man to, number of days the man spent with him, how he negotiated and collected his ransom.”
Asiegbuelam said he escaped to a bush on the day E-money was killed by the police, adding that he stayed in Owerri for two months after the incident.
After the death of Ezenwa, more than 13 buildings including a hotel, belonging to him were reportedly traced by operatives of the Inspector-General of Police Intelligence Response Team to Abia, Imo and Enugu states, while seven cars, two SUVs, one Hilux truck, a commercial bus, two tipper-lorries and a trailer belonging to him were also recovered from several locations within the South-East.