By Onimisi Alao, Yola
Thirty five tractors and 12 motorcycles have been recovered by police authorities from suspected hoodlums in Adamawa State.
The tractors were part of the 110 stolen by hoodlums from NECAS warehouse in Yola.
Also recovered by the police were eight pairs of Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) uniform, nine vehicles, 742 bags of fertilizer, 18 bags of maize and 95 plastic chairs
The Commissioner of Police, Olugbenga Adeyanju, disclosed this while parading 184 people arrested over the violence that trailed the #EndSARS protests in the state.
He said: “We are dealing with hoodlums; that’s just it, because if you say you are looking for palliatives as #EndSARS protesters, you don’t go to FRSC, you don’t go to Red Cross, you don’t go to UNICEF and you don’t go to private warehouses as Covid-19 palliatives are not kept in such places.”
NECAS National Chairman, Sadiq Daware, narrated to reporters on Wednesday how the tractors were rolled out of the firm’s warehouse.
Daware said, “On Sunday, we were informed that hoodlums invaded our warehouses, carting away our farm inputs: fertilizers, herbicides, water pumps, and the rest of the things meant for farmers. The next day (Monday), we also received information that hoodlums had invaded our mechanisation centre where we kept 110 brand new tractors for mechanisation services to Adamawa State.”
He added that the hoodlums rolled out 108 tractors, dismantled the remaining two and left with the vital parts.
The 110 tractors, according to him , are Adamawa State’s share of the 600 tractors acquired earlier for mechanisation services in the six states of the Northeast.
Daware put the value of the ooted tractors at close to N3 billion.
It was also gathered that the ultimatum on Tuesday by Governor Ahmadu Fintiri to looters to return their loot or risk sanctions has been yielding results.
Security agents were seen on Wednesday morning removing some of the stolen items from strategic public places in Yola..
