IN what seems like a harvest of arrests by the police in Edo State, a record number of 115 suspected criminals, including a 14-year-old girl who allegedly killed her employer, were paraded at the command headquarters in Benin city on Friday.
The killer teenager, Miss Hannah Amos, a housemaid was arrested on Wednesday, August 8 for the alleged murder of 71-year-old Mrs. Helen Adodo, a day before, by smashing her head with a big stone.
The young suspect, who had lived with the old woman for about four months since April at Guobadia Street in uptown Benin, said some unseen spirits controlling her, led her to murder the septuagenarian.
Amos said the occultic spirit sternly warned her never to disclose that she was the one responsible for the death of her victim.
The Junior Secondary School student of Itohan Girls’ Grammar School, Benin, who denied being a member of the occult however, confessed that during night time, she normally sees herself in the midst of occultic people singing and dancing but does not participate.
Shedding tears, Amos, a Gbagi from the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), described the deceased as a kindhearted woman who took her like a grand child. She ironically smashed her head with a stone as she dozed off in an armchair on that fateful morning.
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She said: “I don’t know what came over me. Iye (as she was fondly called) was very good to me. She never offended me. The only complaint I had was that she was always rebuking me for not eating much. Some evil forces ordered me to kill her.”
Narrating how it happened, she said that she was alone at home with the victim as her sister went out when she took advantage of her absence to kill her with the big stone which she found at the verandah of the house.
The suspects were arrested for diverse offences from across the state, ranging from cultism, fraud, kidnapping, armed robbery to murder.
The Commissioner of Police, Edo State Command, Mr. Babatunde Kokumo, who paraded the suspects before journalists at the Command headquarters in Benin City, advised criminally-minded persons to either repent or relocate to other places, else, they would face the full wrath of the law.
He alleged that many of the suspects who escaped from the neighbouring states, were arrested in Edo following a crackdown on criminal hideout in the state.
Many of the suspects confessed to the crimes.