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Two people were, early yesterday morning, lynched for vandalising electricity distribution infrastructure in Aba, Abia State, while the third person, their accomplice, managed to escape.
The incident occurred in Okpulor Umuobo, a village in Osisioma Ngwa Local Government Area of the state.
The names of the two electricity cable and wire thieves were not obtained at the time of this report, but it was understood that one of them came from the Okpulor Umuobo village, where he was reputed for years to be a terror, while the other hailed from Ogbor Hill in Abia South LGA. They were both in their late 30s.
A community leader, who pleaded anonymity, said the vandals were caught by the eagle-eyed village vigilance team on duty late into the night, yesterday. He said the vigilantes overpowered the vandals and arrested them together with an 18-seater Hiace bus which they came with.
“The vigilance men kept the criminals in their custody and invited both officers of the Nigeria Police Force and Geometric Security Services Ltd around 7 am,” a witness, who didn’t want her name in print for fear of being attacked by colleagues of the criminals, said.
“Fearing that the security teams would take away the two thieves, the villagers descended on the criminals and attacked them with machetes and clubs,” she added.
Even though the police officers from the Abayi Division and the security men from Geometric Services, a subsidiary of Geometric Power which owns Aba Power, arrived within 15 minutes of being informed of the arrest of the criminals, the two vandals were almost dead by the time the teams reached there, according to a witness.
The villagers were so angry with the thieves that they were removing a bus load of aluminum conductor which Aba Power installed less than a month ago at a high cost, according to Mike Nwocha, a community leader.
“In fact, the crowd wanted to burn the bus used by the thieves to convey the stolen materials, but he and his colleagues, including the policemen sent by the Divisional Police Officer of Abayi, Superintendent Okwudili Idoko, pleaded with them not to do so because that would mean incinerating the company’s materials which the gallant vigilance members collected from the vandals,” Nkwocha further revealed.
Meanwhile, an appeal has gone to stakeholders in the nine of the 17 local government areas in Abia State serviced by Aba Power Distribution Company not to take the laws into their hands, no matter the level of provocation by criminals who destroy critical public infrastructure, including electricity distribution materials.
A respected security consultant, Nick Orjiudeh, a retired Air Commodore with the Nigerian Air Force, gave the advice while speaking to journalists in Aba, against the background of the mob action against the electricity infrastructure vandals. If the Okpulor Umuobo community had handed over the “suspects to the men from the police force or the Geometric Security services’’, he argued, “the security men would have used their training, skills and experience to easily obtain information about their accomplice who escaped.
“What is more, the security men would have utilised their knowledge and skills and experience to trace the persons to whom they sell stolen materials and the very people who provide them with the logistics to damage critical infrastructure, and the logistics here include the stores or places where such materials are kept before they are disposed off.”
Commodore Orjiudeh, also an engineer, decried the spate of attacks on public infrastructure, wondering why some Nigerians in the Southeast would vandalise metals on the newly constructed Second Niger Bridge in Onitsha, Anambra State, and Aba Power transformers and accessories.
“Life would be harder in the Southeast without the Second Niger Bridge and Aba Power,” he observed.
