Kwara man steals 21 phones from admission seekers

A 23-year-old man identified as Quadri Qudus has been arrested by Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps for allegedly stealing 21 telephones from admission seekers in Ilorin, the Kwara State capital.

Quadri was alleged to have stolen the phones from the university admission applicants while they were writing the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination at a Computer-based test center in Ilorin on July 5, 2022.

Quadri who pretended as a face mask seller at the center acted to be a Good Samaritan and collected the phones from the candidates, since they were not allowed to enter the examination centre with the phone.

However, before the students could finish writing their examination papers, the suspect had disappeared from the center with the telephone sets put in his care.

Parading Quadri alongside two other suspects at the state Command headquarters of the NSCDC on Friday, the Command’s spokesperson, Olasunkanmi Ayeni, said that the suspect fell into the hands of the operatives of NSCDC and was arrested in Ilorin after about one month of committing the alleged crime.

Ayeni said, “Quadri Qudus pretended to be selling facemasks at a JAMB examination centre and the student out of trust put the phones in his custody and he ran away with their phones. He was eventually caught by our men in Ilorin.”

Speaking with reporters, Quadri denied running away with the phones saying that the phones were stolen from him and he ran away out of fear of being apprehended and lynched by their owners after they might have finished writing their papers and discovered that their phones were missing.

He claimed, “The phones were actually stolen from where I kept them. I ran away out of fear of what would happen to me.

“I had to run away for my dear life before the owners came out of the examination centre because they would have beaten and lynched me if they learned that their phones have been stolen.”

Two other suspects paraded by the NSCDC included a 55-year-old security man, Arowolo Ayodeji, who allegedly had carnal knowledge of his 19-year-old daughter.

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