A police officer, identified as Inspector Molik Sulaiman, attached to the Lagos State Police Command and posted to the office of Justice Abisoye Bashua of Lagos High Court has been accused of extorting the sum of N5million from three Nigerians.
Sulaiman, according to the victims, presented himself as a visa agent who uses his connection with the Inspector-General of Police, Usman Baba, to process visas for people.
One of the victims, Akeem Ademola Lamidi, who spoke with SaharaReporters on behalf of the two others, Olowilayemo John Dele and Hassan Olayode Gafar, said that the policeman who is currently at large claimed that he would help them get Canada visas but failed to fulfill the deal after he collected full payment of N5 million.
Lamidi said that three of them were in Dubai but came back to Nigeria on holiday in 2016 when they first met Sulaiman and exchanged contacts.
Lamidi told SaharaReporters that “Some time in 2016, I came back from Dubai on vacation, Inspector Molik B. Sulaiman was introduced to me by my wife as their neighbour in the same area; thus we established contact.
“While we were working in Dubai and he later contacted us namely, Akeem Ademola Lamidi, Olowilayemo John Dele and Hassan Olayode Gafar and informed us that he was a visa agent despite he was still serving in the Nigerian Police under IGP and that he uses the position to get visas for people and believed him, having shown us ID card as police officer and pictures he snapped with senior police officers including IGP.
“In 2018, we contacted and told him our intention to travel to Canada and he promised us that he has been procuring Canada visas for people and asked us to pay over five million naira (N5,000,000) which we did and returned to Nigeria to collect the visas to travel to Canada.
“He made us to make full payment before he handed us any visa and we went to the airport to travel and it was discovered that it was fake visas which he admitted and promised to refund the money.
“Since then, he has not refunded the money nor given us any visa, rather, he kept on threatening us, boasting that he is IGP boy and if we dare ask him about the money, he would arrest us and send us to prison or eliminate us.
“The two other parties who made payment are after me demanding money because I was the one who introduced Molik to them. He meant the threats because he has made efforts to arrest us and we managed to escape and went into hiding.
“Meanwhile, this police officer Mr. Molik B. Sulaiman seized and refused to return our passports for us to be able to return back to our place of working country Dubai, UAE” till our companies terminated our jobs and our residence permits after waiting for more than four (4) months for us to come back to our work.”
The victims said that the matter has been reported to the Lagos Commissioner of Police who promised to look into it.
However, an anonymous source close to the victims in an unconfirmed report claimed that the state police command said that the policeman, Inspector Sulaiman had not been seen for about five months now.
Meanwhile, the source noted that “We find out that it is not true. How can a police command say they are looking for their officer for the past five months to prosecute for a crime he committed and they have not seen him? Maybe somebody is not telling the truth.”
The source also claimed that the police authorities however alleged that the judge of the High Court whose office the policeman was attached to was the one shielding him,
“Because they have requested for the policeman from the High Court but the judge refused to release him, saying that he does not have a problem with the policeman, but though they told him the gravity of offence he committed, he (the judge) still refused to release him.
“The name of the High Court judge who is allegedly shielding the policeman is Justice Abisoye Bashua. The police told us in confidence that the judge is the one hiding the policeman.”
