A master at strategic positioning, Mr Kyari knows how to align with high-profile cases. Many Nigerians do not know the backstory of how he positioned himself just in time to take credit in the Evans case. In an article profiling another police officer Olatunji Disu, Lagos-based journalist Tunde Opeseitan said, “many did not know that it was Disu that did the major work in the celebrated operation that led to the arrest of Evans.”
At times, he would trigger raw disaffection amongst members of his own squad by dashing in to hug media cameras after a major crime has been busted. In May 2018 for instance, he appeared in Benue to claim credit for a major sting operation that led to the arrest of armed suspects and recovery of AK-47s, even though he was not a part of the operation, according to separate accounts of three senior police detectives.
He repeated similar tactics in Kwara following the Offa bank robbery that claimed many lives, but he ended up politicising the matter when he brutally murdered the prime suspect Michael Adiukwu after his plot to have suspects implicate Bukola Saraki and politicise the case failed. His underhand dealings did not go unnoticed amongst his colleagues, who held him in perpetual contempt.
If you call Mr Kyari’s fall from celebrity crime-buster to America’s most wanted criminal karma, you might not be wrong, especially if you are one of his victims. While he was considered a supercop and role model for fellow officers, not everyone loved Mr Kyari. Over the years, several allegations of human rights abuses and extortions brought against Mr Kyari were all swept under his achievements in fighting crime and criminals.
In 2019, Samuel Ogundipe, formerly of Premium Times, once exposed how Mr Kyari and his fellow IRT members killed a former police corporal, Collins ‘E-Money’ Ezenwa, after accusing him of being a suspected kidnapper, then went ahead to takeover multibillion-naira properties belonging to the slain suspect and pocketing millions in rent from those properties.
While he was using the media to hype himself and artificially boost his chances for promotion, Mr Kyari, the youngest deputy commissioner was also conducting dirty businesses.
Perhaps if the police had acted on all the credible allegations of corruption and gruesome rights abuses levelled against him in the past, Mr Kyari would probably no longer be a police officer by the time of this FBI indictment,”.
Source:- Gazette Ngr
