Members of his gang, who were arrested admitted to have carried out four successful kidnap operations since their leader was rescued from the Owerri High Court. Some of the kidnap victims were allegedly killed by Vampire.
There are many versions to the tales surrounding the life and time of Henry Chibueze, known in the underworld as Vampire, but all without exception evokes dread, almost like a clip from a horror movie. The incidents that marked his rise and fall in the crime world clearly stood him out as very cunning and mortally vicious.
Either as the hunter or the hunted, Vampire was an extremely dangerous person to deal with. Overtly elusive and wily, he had been on the ‘Most Wanted’ list of the Police and the Department of State Services (DSS) since 2013. While the law enforcement agencies were then unable to score any hit on Vampire, they were however able to establish a pattern associated with his operations which aided the DSS in tracking him down and arresting him for the first time in 2015.
Before the arrest, Vampire was just a faceless terror and a bad news in security circles. He had on many occasions beaten the security dragnet of the DSS but this time he had his wings clipped for the first time, or so we thought, by a detachment of combat-ready operatives of the DSS who had trailed him to Disney Hotel, Owerri, Imo State, where his gang was about to kidnap Election Petitions Tribunal Judges.
The kidnap operation was busted by the DSS but Vampire escaped this time, with a bullet wound. Speaking to newsmen at the time in 2015, the then Imo State Director of the DSS, Francis Ejiofor, said that Vampire was eventually arrested after an operation where his victim’s family had to part with N15 million ransom. According to Ejiofor, “Mr. Henry Chibueze known as Vampire, engages in kidnapping from Nigeria to Cotonou, Congo and Ivory Coast.
He is a vicious kidnapper and he kills his victims at the slightest suspicion that security operatives are on his trail. When we learnt that he was in the state and had kidnapped a woman we waited until he had collected the ransom and released the woman and we went after him. “We traced him to Disney Hotel, Owerri, where he was planning to kidnap the tribunal judges who were lodged there but our men stormed the place and he escaped with gunshot wounds to the home of his native doctor in Ohafia, Abia State, where he was eventually arrested in a pre-dawn raid.”
The name, ‘Vampire’ according to security sources invokes fear in the hearts of families of victims who have heard gory tales of his blood chilling operations and often part with huge sums of money without informing security agents. Not a few of his victims believe that the name ‘Vampire’ aptly depicted his huge appetite for bloodletting and violence.
Giving dreadful details of his criminal activities in his five years of operation while being paraded, Vampire said that he had lost count of victims he had killed for failure to pay up the ransom or for getting security agents involved.
He particularly recounted how he killed his girlfriend, Sandra, who he said absconded with his N45 million. In his words: “Yes I shot my girlfriend and everybody in their house because she stole my N45 million which I kept in my house. I went to her family house in Lagos and when she saw me coming, she ran into the house I went in and shot her and everybody in the room. She died instantly but I don’t know how others died.
Continue reading on next page…
0gial
No comments:
Post a Comment