Police allegedly tried extorting money from man minutes after escaping death
By Abayomi Giwa
Their car is a wreck but the situation could have been worse.
A man who appeared to be in his sixties was driving along the Gbagada expressway in Lagos State when a trailer driver veered in his direction.
The accident happened under the pedestrian bridge at the popular Charlie Boy bus stop at about 1:10 p.m. on Tuesday.
The man, in a frantic bid to avoid going under the trailer, opted to crash the side nose of his car into one of the pillars holding the bridge.
His bet paid off as no life was lost. The trailer driver didn’t stop, we gathered.
A woman, probably his wife, was also in the car. She was not bodily hurt but we gathered she was in shock.
“The man arranged for a taxi to drive her home,” an eyewitness told NewsroomNG.
There is a police station opposite the scene of the crash.
Immediately after the crash, police officers were reported to have stormed the scene.
“They wanted to impound the man’s vehicle for ramming into the pillar and damaging public property,” another eyewitness told NewsroomNG.
But when we asked the police if this was true, “they are mad men,” a high ranking official said.
“The people who told you that are mad men,” he said.
“I was there myself. I coordinated the effort to get the car out of the road. We never attempted impounding any vehicle. It was a lone crash.”
But the eyewitness who alleged that later insisted the police official was lying.
“The man had to prove to them that he is an oga (a man of means, a “boss,” or an influential person) before they dropped the idea of impounding his vehicle,” the eyewitness said.
“They were probably going to impound the vehicle and extort money from him,” he said.
