Julius Adegun had on Saturday, September
21, 2013, boarded a commercial bus from Abule-Egba, on the
Lagos-Abeokuta Expresssway, around 10.30pm.
He was heading to Iyana-Ipaja but had no
idea he had boarded the bus with a three-man gang of robbers. The events
that unfolded later were to confound him because it was one he had
never heard of.
“I had heard of robbers waylaying people
after they had used the ATM before. I had even heard of people being
ambushed immediately they were about to use the ATM and forced to
withdraw certain amount of money by robbers. But I never imagined I
would be a victim of this kind of robbery,” he said.
Continue reading after the cut....
He told Saturday PUNCH there were already nine passengers in the 14-seater bus apart from the driver as at the time he boarded.
The bus had moved about 10 minutes when
it got to a bank on the expressway towards Iyana Ipaja and the robbers
promptly swung into action, he said.
“One of the robbers, who had posed as the
conductor all along turned towards us and asked, ‘Hope you all have
your ATM cards?’ He spoke in pidgin. Nobody seemed to be listening to
him because we did not realise what was happening at first.
‘Then he said to the driver, ‘Alaye,
enter that bank.’ That was when I started to connect the dots in my
head. We started protesting, asking why they would be stopping in front
of a bank at that time of the night.
“Clearly, the driver was a part of the
gang. One of the robbers who had sat quietly at the back of the bus with
one other passenger shouted at us. He said, ‘Shut up! Just cooperate
peacefully and you will be on your way. He pointed a locally made pistol
at us.”
Adegun said after the robbers had told
them to bring out their ATM cards or risk being shot, some of them
promptly did. But two passengers – a young man and a woman – who said
they had no ATM card on them were slapped many times as they were being
searched.
Eventually, five of them had ATM cards on them at the time.
“One of the robbers took us in turn to
the ATM and asked us to put in our Personal Identification Numbers. They
withdrew everything that each of us had in the account.
“I had N43,000 in my account. They first
checked the account balance and withdrew N40,000. I was initially
praying that the ATM would not work that day but unfortunately it did.
“The other victims too were robbed of
almost all they had in each of their accounts. A young man with us
actually said he was supposed to use the N80,000 in his account to buy
tyres for his boss the following morning. But everything was withdrawn.
He was the one they robbed of the highest amount.”
He said they could not raise the alarm
because the robber with the gun threatened to shoot anyone that
attempted to make any noise.
Asked if they reported to the police
after the robbery, he said after the robbers took them into a street off
the major road and asked them to disembark, he immediately called a
police distress line he had on his phone.
“The details of the robbery, the number
of victims, and the description of the vehicle were taken by the person
who answered the call. The police promised to alert the patrol team in
the area but I don’t know what happened after that,” he said.
Asked if he was able to get the vehicle’s number plate, he said it was too dark for him to be able to make out the number.
This method of using commercial buses
seems to make it easier for the robbers to rob a higher number of people
at once rather than staking out ATM terminals.
Robberies at ATM are not new in Lagos.
There have been many reports of ambush at ATM terminals where customers
are asked to withdraw money at gun points.
A victim, Mr. Funso Aina, told of how he
was once robbed at gun point at the ATM terminal of a bank on Mobolaji
Bank Anthony Way, Ikeja around 9.30pm on September 23, 2013 when he was
coming back from work.
Aina told Saturday PUNCH, “That
night, I parked and got out but I noticed a young man at one of the four
terminals at the bank. I actually thought he was also trying to
withdraw money.
“But as soon as I withdrew money, he
pulled out his phone and spoke into it. He turned to me and put a gun to
my head. He said, ‘Give me the money’ and grabbed it even before I
handed it to him.
“As that was taking place, another young
man had approached, who must have been the one the first one was
speaking to on the phone. The second man put a gun to my side and asked
me to withdraw some money. ‘N50,000! N50,000!’ he told me.
“But I calmly explained that I would
withdraw the money but they should understand that I could not withdraw
N50,000 at once. But as I pressed the buttons on the ATM, one of them
quickly pressed it himself and withdrew N10,000. As he attempted to
withdraw more money, the ATM stopped working.”
Aina said the robbers got N20,000 from him in total. He said they also took away his BlackBerry phone.
He did not report to the police.
“You know how the police would ask you to
come back everyday; I did not want such stress. If the robbers took
something sensitive like my identity card or something of that nature
for example, I would have reported,” he said.
He said his experience had since made him wary of using ATM at night.
Spokesperson of the Lagos State Police
Command, Ngozi Braide, said she had not got a report to indicate if this
trend is on the rise in Lagos.
She said it does not help the police when victims of crimes do not report them to the police.
Braide said, “Making reports at the
nearest police station when something like that happens allows us to
have a record. It also gives us leads to go on with in our
investigation.
“It is always important for victims of
robberies like those in the commercial bus to try and get the number
plates of the vehicles used by the robbers. Armed security men are
supposed to be at the banks where these ATMs are sited.
“Banks should try and put adequate lighting around their ATMs to discourage robbers.”
But Aina said he was robbed in a well lit open ATM gallery.
-Punch
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