When a gang of kidnappers checked into a hotel in Bucknor Estate, Isolo, Lagos, they thought they had found the perfect cover.

To the hotel staff, they were ordinary guests: quiet, unassuming, paying their bills without fuss. But behind closed doors, they were running a sophisticated criminal operation, mapping out abduction targets across Jakande, Oke-Afa, and Okota with the cold precision of seasoned professionals. That was until the eagle-eyed operatives of the Commissioner of Police Special Squad 1 smoked them out, and their world came crashing down.

Nation under siege

Kidnapping has become one of Nigeria’s most persistent and devastating afflictions which shows no signs of relenting.

From the insurgency-ravaged North-East, where terrorist groups have for years used mass abductions as instruments of terror and fundraising, to the forests of the South-East and South-West, the crime has carved a trail of trauma across the country’s geography and its conscience. School children abducted from dormitories. Farmers taken from their fields. Commuters dragged from vehicles on highways.

Even as you read this, 46 pupils and teachers abducted from schools in Oyo State are entering their 23rd day in a kidnappers’ den, their families waiting, their classrooms empty, their fate unknown.

New breed of kidnappers

But a quieter, more calculated breed of the crime has been steadily taking root in Nigeria’s cities perpetrated not by ideologically driven militants, but by organised criminal gangs who blend into everyday life, operate in plain sight, and strike with the cold efficiency of professionalism.

In Lagos, that efficiency recently had an address. It was a room in a hotel on Graceland Avenue, opposite Duduyemi Bus Stop, Bucknor, in the Oshodi-Isolo Local Government Area of Lagos , an unremarkable hotel in the busy part of town. The men who checked in looked like other travellers passing through Lagos. They paid their bills. They kept to themselves. They came and went at odd hours.

What nobody in that hotel knew was that those quiet comings and goings were coordinated surveillance runs, the meticulous preparation of a kidnapping gang that had turned the hotel room into a command base for a series of planned abductions across Jakande Estate, Oke-Afa, and the Okota axis.

They were, by every indication, businessmen of a particular and brutal kind, men who had professionalised kidnapping, complete with luxury vehicles, multiple international passports, foreign travel histories, and the tactical discipline of a unit that had done this before.

Neighbourhood living in fear

They had chosen their hunting ground carefully. For residents of Jakande Estate, Oke-Afa, and Bungalow Road, fear had quietly become a companion in the weeks leading up to the night of May 24, 2026. What once passed as quiet suburban evenings had turned into corridors of dread, where motorists slowed down not only for speed bumps, but for fear of what might emerge from the darkness.

The pattern was becoming familiar, and it was chilling. Vehicles were being intercepted in the dead of night. Armed men would materialise from the shadows, block a car, drag the driver out, and bundle him into a waiting vehicle before disappearing back into the darkness, with gunshots echoing across the neighbourhood to Wade off intruders. Then silence. Then morning and the awful knowledge that it had happened again.

One such incident occurred on Bucknor Road two weeks ago. Eyewitnesses described watching helplessly as a driver was dragged from his vehicle after attempts to escape proved futile. A passenger was struck by a bullet as the car was attacked. The abductors vanished into the night before anyone could respond.

An eyewitness who gave his name simply as Mope recalled: “Everything was done very fast. He was the one directing them. You could tell he was in charge. That same operational pattern was repeated on that same route a few days earlier.”

The “he” Mope referred to was a tall, lanky figure who had become the stuff of neighbourhood nightmares, a man who conducted kidnappings with the calm precision of someone who had done this many times before. He reportedly wore a handkerchief tied across his nose and mouth. He carried an AK-47. And he gave his orders methodically as the operation unfolded around him.

Intelligence that set the trap

While residents lived in fear, operatives of the Commissioner of Police Special Squad 1, headed by Banti Adamu, were watching.

Intelligence had reached the Commissioner of Police, Lagos State, CP Tijani Fatai, that a sophisticated kidnapping syndicate had arrived in the city , one that specialised in targeting wealthy businessmen and had been systematically surveilling high-value targets across the Jakande, Oke-Afa, Bungalow Road, and Okota axis.

Acting on the CP’s directive, operatives of the Special Squad 1 began their surveillance. They monitored. They gathered. And on May 24, 2026, the intelligence crystallised into something actionable: the gang was preparing to strike that same night, targeting a specific businessman approaching from the Okota axis. Their chosen ambush point was Jakande Estate gate.

Gun battle

At approximately 9:30 p.m., as the gang lay in wait at Jakande Estate gate, they encountered something they had not planned for, the presence of the operatives.

On sighting the operatives closing in, the gang reportedly opened fire, leading to a fierce gun battle that sent motorists, roadside traders, and commuters scattering in every direction, abandoning vehicles and stalls as bullets cracked through the night air.

The operatives held their ground. When it was over, four members of the gang lay dead, while one reportedly managed to flee into the darkness with bullet wounds that investigators say make his survival uncertain.

A police Inspector also sustained a gunshot injury in the leg during the exchange and was evacuated to the Police College Hospital, Ikeja, where he was said to be responding to treatment.

From the scene, operatives according to the Commissioner of Police, recovered one Toyota Sienna used as the gang’s operational vehicle, one AK-47 rifle with two magazines and 25 live rounds, and one SMG rifle loaded with 12 rounds of ammunition.

Startling discovery

In the aftermath of the Jakande Gate operation, investigators from Command Special Squad 1 did what experienced detectives do. Police sources hinted that the operatives followed every thread the dead men had left behind.

One of those threads was telecommunications. By tracing the call patterns and movements of the neutralised suspects, investigators established that the gang had been making and receiving regular calls from a fixed location traced to a hotel in Bucknor, an area that shares a border with Jakande Estate, Oke-Afa, Isheri Oshun and Ijegun.

That trail took operatives to the doorstep of the hotel on May 27, 2026, three days after the gun battle.

Separately, and unknown to investigators at the time, the hotel management had already reported the guests’ abandoned vehicles, a Lexus and a Camry, sitting untouched in the car park, to the Isheri Police Division.

Police sources hinted that the rooms the gang had occupied were not the quarters of men living carelessly. They were the operational base of a structured criminal enterprise.

The recovered exhibits told the story methodically: one silver Lexus ES350 with Lagos registration BDG 174 HP and one dark grey Toyota Camry with Abuja registration RSH 295 CW, as well as travelling bags, clothing, electrical cables, assorted fittings, and household materials.

In addition, there was a declaration of age document, and three international passports, two Nigerian and one from Côte d’Ivoire.

One of the two Nigerian passports and the Ivorian passport both carried the same face: Onwukwalu Junior Ifeanyi, born April 26, 1990, indigene of Ihiala, Anambra State. Detectives said he had been travelling the world as both a Nigerian and as one Kouadio Yves Alexandre.

A third Nigerian passport bore the name Nzeribe Izuchukwu Victor, born May 5, 1995, an indigene of Ibiasoegbe, Imo State, identified as another suspected member of the gang.

Police sources confirmed that from the hotel, the gang had coordinated every aspect of their operations, ranging from surveillance runs, target profiling, and logistics to the movements that preceded each abduction. The hotel had not merely been their bedroom. It had been their headquarters.

Disturbing findings

Of all the revelations to emerge from the investigation, none was more disturbing than the full profile of Onwukwalu Ifeanyi, alias Ifeko, himself.

According to CP Fatai, Ifeanyi was not based in Nigeria. “He lived abroad and made deliberate, targeted trips to Lagos for the specific purpose of carrying out kidnappings. His travel history spanning Argentina, India, and China, pointed to a man embedded in criminal networks that extended well beyond Nigeria’s borders,” the CP said.

More chillingly, police sources disclosed that Ifeanyi was the man who had trained Henry Asoona, the gang leader of the notorious “billionaire kidnappers” neutralised at the Ladipo International Spare Parts Market in Lagos in 2024. That operation had rattled Lagos. The trainer of the man who ran it had simply absorbed the lesson, regrouped, and returned to build another gang.

CP Fatai confirmed that “investigation is ongoing to apprehend the fleeing suspect and other accomplices connected to the gang, while the bodies of the neutralised gang members have been deposited at the morgue.”

The ownership of the recovered vehicles was being verified, while the true identities of two of the four neutralised suspects, including the man known only as Moden, are still being established, according to police sources.

For residents of Jakande Estate and other areas that the gang had laid siege to, the fear has not entirely gone, it rarely does after something like this.

But their relief is that the tall, lanky figure, with handkerchief across his face and AK-47 in his hands, will not emerge from the darkness again.

However, for Lagosians, the larger question remains: in a city where one man can train two separate kidnapping gangs across two years, how many more Ifekos are there right now, somewhere, checking into a hotel room, ordering room service, and planning whose life to destroy next? (Saturday Vanguard)

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