Ex-robber confesses: I was paid to kill in church

Mr. Ifeanyi Egbo, residing in South Africa, but back home, was once a robber and kidnapper. He confessed this himself. The only son of his mother, he ended up as an orphan in his teen. He became a dreaded citizen, who led robbery gangs until he was arrested.

This self-confessed criminal lost his parents when he was 13 years old and life became difficult. There was nobody to help. His only option to survival was menial job and that led him into porting of goods with the wheelbarrow, which he did for a year before he discontinued because not much returns came from it.

To find the missing link between his economic state and wealth, he sauntered into criminality and ultimately robbery.

He operated between Anambra and Enugu states – robbing and killing. In operations, he got the best and most sophisticated arms because of his dexterity in handling guns. He extended his operation to the Benin axis, where his gang attacked luxury buses on the Lagos route.

According to him, he gained notoriety in the fold of dreaded bad boys and stretched his clientele and areas of competence to assassination, kidnap, robbery and many more, so far as the fee was okay.
He told Saturday Sun, after his confession, in a church service: “I fired many luxury bus drivers and escorts on the highway and I could rob for four or five hours without fainting.”

According to him, on one robbery outing, which he conducted with three others, an argument ensued. He revealed that in the course of sharing the money, a member of the gang shot two and also aimed to kill him, in order to take the loot all alone. But luck ran out on the “traitor,” as he (Ifeanyi) succeeded in killing him and therefore inherited the entire loot. He revealed that he carried the money into a club, where it was squandered on women and drinks, instead of investing it on a building in his father’s compound, which was one of his purposes of venturing into robbery.

Ifeanyi, on hearing that the relatives of the slain colleagues were searching for him, left for the northern part of the country where he joined a bank robbery gang. On one incident, he successfully carried a bank safe into their vehicle. On a leisure day, a mad woman met him on the way while carrying huge sum of money he carted away from a bank. She warned him to desist from robbery or he would end up badly. He said the woman advised him to go and give the money to the destitute.

Ifeanyi confessed that his sister, a member of the Lord’s Chosen Church, had been persuading him to join her and worship in her church but to no avail. In fact, he almost killed his sister for inviting him to church, challenging her to show evidence of her years in the church.
“But she did not know that we had been commissioned by a big man in the East to attack and kill Pastor Lazarus Muoka, the leader of The Lord’s Chosen, and to also steal proceeds from offering at a crusade in Abakaliki, Ebonyi State in 2005,” he confessed.

He said he was given the job of the sniper, to shoot the pastor. But he could not do it alone and therefore invited 51 others from different parts of the country. “The machine guns for the operation were given to me. There were the type that no police or soldier would withstand when they hear the sound. It is called buffer,” he boasted.
To accomplish his aim, he joined the church when the preparation for the crusade was on. When the crusade began, he decided to attend with his boys on the second day. They came in 32 vehicles, together with the map of the area and promising the assignee that the job would be successful.

On that fateful day, the gang members positioned themselves at the crusade ground. Nobody knew they were carrying guns. “We were monitoring the vehicle that would bring the offering bags out of the crusade ground. We exchanged signals on sighting the vehicle with the bags of money. I had informed my boys to wait for my shot before any action would be taken, because I was the one to kick-start the operation,” he revealed.

As the vehicle conveying the offering money approached him, he moved fast towards the vehicle. Immediately he lifted his gun to pump bullets into the people conveying the vehicle, blindness descended on him. He lost his sight.
He said: “I started shouting: “I no dey see again, I no dey see again. The man who commissioned us ordered that I should be arrested and detained.”

They took away all guns from Ifeanyi, not knowing he had one in his back pocket. When the man came in the evening to eliminate him, in the detention room, he fired the man dead. Instead of killing Pastor Muoka, he killed the man, who paid him for the job.

After the incident, he moved to Abuja and then Kaduna and later to Niger Republic, intensifying his robbery activities. After one of his robbery outings, as they shared their booty, he was arrested. “The law enforcement officers killed some of our boys and I was eventually put in jail, which I served for eight years. That was after a rival gang accosted us, after a successful bank robbery in Abuja,” he said.

From the day he landed in jail, he made up his mind to turn a new leaf and later repented in prison when The Lord’s Chosen Prison Evangelism visited him in detention, in the course of their general outreach to inmates.
Earlier this month, when the church had a programme, after he had been released, he felt like declaring what happened and what he has been through. When the church was in full session during the testimony hour, Ifeanyi stepped unto the podium, but with a different story concerning his past.

He regaled the congregation with tales of how he would have eliminated the head of the church.

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