The Department of State Services, DSS, has given a detailed account of how it arrested one John Agbo, a notorious man, who has been threatening to attack schools in Abuja.
The account was given on Friday 17th April through a witness account by one of DSS officials named Michael Jego at a federal high court in Abuja before presiding Judge Joyce Abdulmalik in the ongoing trial of the arrested suspect.
Jego informed the court that the suspect was charged with cybercrime and terrorism after the agency responded to petitions filed by the impacted schools in 2024 following the receipt of threatening SMS messages from several phone lines.
One of the requests, he added, was from Oakland International School and was dated November 28, 2024.
According to Jego, this petition prompted an investigation that revealed John Agbo had sent a number of mails to Oakland International British School, Premier International School, and The Regent Secondary School.
The prosecution claims that the texts threatened the lives of instructors and pupils and warned of planned attacks on the schools.
In one of the communications, the sender said that it would take less than a minute to carry out an attack on the schools, killing both teachers and pupils.
Additionally, Jego informed the court that four phone numbers purportedly used to transmit the texts were connected to the suspect. Jego claimed that after that, the DSS used tracking devices to direct agents to Otukpo in Benue state, where Agbo was taken into custody.
“A mobile phone and a SIM card were recovered from him at the point of arrest,” he said.
“The defendant was subsequently moved to Abuja, where he made a statement in the presence of a lawyer from the Legal Aid Council of Nigeria.”
A Tecno Android phone that was found from the defendant, petitions from the schools, and a compact disc with audio and video recordings of the interrogation were among the documents that the prosecution tendered throughout the proceedings. He added that copies of the messages and the phone numbers were provided by the schools.
When questioned about who owned the lines, the witness insisted that the defendant acknowledged helping to draft the messages, but he was unable to verify if they actually bought and registered belonged to John Agbo.
John Agbo, however, denied owning the phone, even though he acknowledged being familiar with it.
ENigeria Newpaper learnt that in order to continue the trial, the presiding judge Joyce Abdulmali, postponed the case of John Agbo to May 12.
