A driver and his conductor have been reportedly shot dead by policemen attached to the Taraba state police command along Jalingo-Wukari Road for allegedly refusing to bribe police officers.
According to The Punch, the incident happened on Sunday, August 23 around 6 p.m when policemen mounted a road block on the road. The driver and conductor’s refusal to part with the N500 bribe demanded by the police led to them being shot.
This led to a protest by drivers who took to the road in solidarity of their dead comrades. They were however dispersed by soldiers who allegedly shot into the air to stop the protest.
The police however denied the incident. Kwaji Joseph, the police public relations officer of the state said the police actually lost an officer in the fracas.
“On Sunday at about 6.45pm, our patrol team that was on stop-and-search intercepted a trailer coming from Jalingo and heading towards Wukari.
“As you know, the police have the power to check and interrogate to know where they were coming from and where they were going.
“That particular area has been in crisis for some time now.
“But the trailer driver and his passengers, numbering about 50, came down from the trailer and attacked our policemen. They said the President (Mummamadu Buhari) had ordered a ban on checkpoints.
“In the process, they killed one of our policemen, Corporal Sunday Ate, and stole his AK-47 and 50 rounds of ammunition.”
He added that police were deployed to put the situation under control and they were able to recover the gun. He however said that the police recovered a body far from the scene of the incident and claimed the police was not responsible.
“We recovered another corpse about 150 metres away from the scene of the incident.
“The police were not responsible for the death and we did not shoot at anybody,” he added.
In a related incident, a naval officer shot and wounded three people in Lagos after he left his duty post to take alcohol.
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