Five individuals were taken into custody by the Niger State police for possessing a human skull.
The suspects, who have been identified as Isah Mohammed, 26, Idris Mohammed, 28, Ibrahim Jiya, 18, Suleiman Usman, 22, and Abdullahi Usman, 24, confessed to having removed the three-year-old corpse of one Ndako Daniyan from the Sakpe village burial ground in the Edati local government area of Niger state.
When questioned, Isah and Abdullahi confessed that they had met Alfa Suleiman, a Kwara State-born Islamic cleric, in Bida while looking to get rich quickly. Alfa Suleiman had advised them to acquire a human skull for ritual purposes.
The pair said that when they were stopped by police, they were on their way to deliver the skull to someone in the Kpakungun neighbourhood of Minna with N30,000.
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“We went to the burial ground in Sakpe village and we dug up the body. From what we saw, the person had been dead for three years and he was from Sakpe village. The reason why we did this is because we want to be rich. It is not easy living in Nigeria. Life is hard and we want to be rich so that we will leave this poverty and life of hardship,” Isah said.
Isah Mohammed and Idris Mohammed were apprehended on September 11 by personnel of a sister security agency while on routine patrol at the toll-gate along the Bida-Minna route, according to the Niger Police command’s spokesperson, DSP Abiodun Wasiu. The skull was found wrapped in a bag during the course of searching the passengers, he stated, adding that the suspects were apprehended in a Mitsubishi Lancer car.
According to Abiodun, the suspects admitted to helping to excavate the grave where the skull was exhumed during questioning, and this led to the arrest of three additional people.
He continued by saying that the five suspects had been sent to SCID Minna for a covert investigation and thorough prosecution while the case was still being looked into.