An officer of the Nigeria Police Force, Owolabi Akinlolu, has been remanded in prison over alleged rape.
The officer is alleged to have sexually assaulted a 17-year-old girl in his office in Lagos State.
Naijaonpoint reports that Akinlolu, an officer attached at the Ogudu Police Station in Lagos, had promised to help his victim retrieve her phone, which was stolen by ‘one chance’ robbers.
Reports revealed that Akintolu had overheard the young girl narrating her phone theft experience to her mother at her shop and offered to help track the phone.
Sharing her ordeal with newsmen, the victim said: “On June 29, Officer Owolabi called my mum on her phone and told her he had arrested the person with my phone and my mum should send me to his police station, and I went there. On getting there, I was told they made a mistake with the tracking and that the person caught wasn’t the one with my phone.”
“The officer sent his personal assistant to call me into his office, and he showed me directions there. When I entered his office and greeted him, he replied and got up to lock the door and put the key in his pocket. I shouted, ‘Sir, why did you lock the door?’
“He started trying to pull my clothes off, and I shouted, then he brought out a gun, cocked it, and threatened to shoot me if I shouted. Then he began harassing me and when I struggled with him he hit me on the back of my head with the gun and raped me.
“I saw his phone ringing and the caller was my mum, but he told me since I didn’t have a phone with me, I should tell her I didn’t get to his office and from now on I should be reporting at his office by 12 pm every day during school break or while returning from school that he had been watching me for two years and now I just fell into his trap,” the teenager told The PUNCH.
In July 2024, the mother of the victim, Aramide Olupona, accused the police of trying to cover up the allegation.
“The suspect’s wife and the rest of his family have come to my shop to plead with me saying he would soon retire, but what about my daughter that was raped? Is it because I am a poor woman?” she said.
However, on Tuesday at Magistrate Court 11, the prosecution counsel requested the court to remand the defendant.
Supporting this request, the prosecution presented a seven-paragraph affidavit, asserting that the crime of defilement contravenes Section 137 of the Criminal Law of Lagos State, 2015.
In response to the prosecution’s plea, Magistrate O.O. Fagboun ordered the defendant to be remanded at the Maximum Correctional Centre in Kirikiri.
The Magistrate subsequently adjourned the case until March 11, 2025, for trial and additional proceedings.