Men of the Ondo State Police Command have apprehended a couple, Lukman Isiaka, 42, and his wife, Abosede Olanipekun, 23, for allegedly stealing children across Ondo and Osun States.
The police have recovered 10 of the stolen children, but some distraught parents who thronged the command’s headquarters lamented that their children were still missing.
The couple reportedly used various methods to abduct the children, selling each one for ₦1 million to Sabina Izuorah, a 62-year-old resident of Ihiala in Anambra State.
Police investigators disclosed that the suspects may have been involved in similar crimes in Edo State before extending their operations to Ondo and Osun.
Many of the rescued children struggled to recognise their parents, as their names had been changed and they now spoke the Igbo dialect.
Some were stolen in the year 2022.
Four infants, aged between one and six weeks, whose parents remain unidentified, were recovered from 62-year-old Sabina Izuorah by the Ondo State Police Command.
The arrest of the suspects, Lukman Isiaka and his wife, Abosede Olanipekun, followed a police investigation into the abduction of a child reported missing by her mother.
Isiaka, posing as Samuel Adejobi, had promised to marry the child’s mother and introduced his wife, Abosede, as his sister named Ewatomi.
On the pretext of buying the woman a phone, Isiaka left her child in the care of his “sister.”
When Isiaka and his accomplice disappeared with the child, the distraught mother raised the alarm, prompting the police to track the couple to their residence in Edo State.
