#parent | #kids | #childabductors | Nigeria: I Deceived My Wife to Keep Kidnapped Cleric’s Twins – Suspect


Ibadan — An Ibadan-based herbalist, Mutiu Rafiu, yesterday narrated to the Oyo State Police Command how he lied to his wife, Medinat, that the twins of an Islamic cleric in Ibadan, Alhaji Taofeek Azeez, popularly called Akeugbagold, whom he and six other suspects had kidnapped and he had brought home, were children of his friends.

Rafiu said he told Medinat that the friend and his wife recently separated and were yet to decide who between them would take custody of the children.

The suspect, who confessed during a press conference in Ibadan, yesterday to conspiring with some other persons to kidnap the twins, pleaded that his wife be exonerated from the crime, saying she was innocent.

Akeugbagold, who is the immediate past Chairman of the Oyo State Pilgrims Welfare Board (Muslim Wing), had announced the abduction of his twins, a boy and a girl aged 28 months, via his facebook page on Sunday April 26, 2020.

A video of the twins’ mother crying that she suffered delayed childbirth for 12 years before she got pregnant with the twins and begging the kidnappers to release them, had also gone viral.

Also paraded as one of the suspected kidnappers was Opeyemi Oyeleye, who had been a personal aide to the father of the kidnapped twins.

Opeleye, who the police described as the mastermind of the crime, said he was not part of the abduction process at the initial stage but could not avert it when his fellow suspects later told him about it.

He further said he thought he could mediate between the kidnappers and the parents of the twins but couldn’t do so before the police arrested him as part of the syndicate.