Five suspects, including three members of the Oil Field Surveillance Ltd (OFSL) contracted to keep watch on oil facilities in Warri waterways and beyond were nabbed conveying illegally refined diesel from a refining camp towards Warri over the weekend.
Soldiers from 3rd Battalion, Nigerian Army and Sector 1, Operation Pulo Shield, led by Lieutenant Colonel Ifeanyi Otu, made the arrest of the five suspects while on patrol of waterways at Benit Island, Macaraba and Ogbukoko in Warri South Local Government Area of the stateat the wee hours of Friday.
Two women, one a nursing mother with a baby and the other, heavily pregnant woman, were caught in the act of scooping diesel into cans and drums for onward ferrying to Warri.
OFSL is a company owned by former dreaded warlord, Chief Government Okpemupolo, alias Tompolo, whose contract was said to have been renewed by the Federal Government to continue keeping surveillance on oil facilities in the creeks of the Niger Delta.
Efforts made to reach OFSL’s General Manager, Kestin Pondi, were unsuccessful as he neither picked his phone nor replied the text message sent to his phone; same applies to the media person, Paul Bebenimibo, whose line was not reachable, but was later said to have travelled abroad.
The names of the suspects were given as Mr Blessing Emotoghan Akpos (32); Mr Omotoye Rufus (34); Mrs Tokere Lucky; Mrs Ayase Abibara (38); Mr Victor Tene (22).
The female suspects told the Nigerian Tribune that they were not oil thieves, but were fisher women who were busy with their business before they were nabbed by the soldiers.
Mr Tene, an indigene of Calabar, confessed to have committed the crime but the two other male suspects denied being a party to illegal oil refining. They insisted that they were on patrol of waterways when they were picked up by the soldiers.
Confirming the arrest and culpability of the suspects, Colonel Otu stated that the patrol was a successful one as over 15 boats of locally-refined diesel and crude oil were burnt.
According to him, it was normal for criminals not to own up when they were caught, but that the suspects were caught in the very act at local refinery camps, adding that they had no business being at the camps at the wee hours of that day if they were not oil thieves.
Otu, who promised to hand over the suspects to appropriate quarters, if the suspects were caught in communities, leaders of such communities would have been apprehended as earlier handed down by the military authorities in Benin.
He advised unrepentant oil bunkerers to consider the economic and environmental hazards of their activities and have a change of heart before nemesis catches up with them.
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