LASTMA nabs ‘one-chance’ gang, recovers operational vehicle
Operatives of the Lagos State Traffic Management Authority have arrested a three-man ‘one chance’ gang at Jubilee Bridge in the Abule-Egba area of the state.
‘One chance’ is commonly used in Nigeria to refer to a robbery that takes place when a group of criminals pick up passengers in disguised commercial vehicles to rob or defraud them.
The information of the arrest was made known in a statement released by Adebayo Taofiq, the LASTMA Director, Public Affairs and Enlightenment Department, and shared on the agency’s X handle on Thursday.
According to Taofiq, the robbers were arrested by LASTMA personnel alongside their operational vehicle, a painted ‘T4’ commercial bus with number plate APP 406 YE, at the U-turn area of Abule-Egba.
He wrote, “Operatives of the Lagos State Traffic Management Authority today arrested three notorious ‘one chance’ armed robbers by Jubilee Bridge around Abule-Egba area of Lagos.
“Immediately they were arrested, one of them escaped with a POS machine before the arrival of the policemen.
“Preliminary investigations revealed that they were notorious ‘one-chance’ armed robbers terrorising the entire Abule-Egba and its environs.”
The statement added that investigations revealed that they were being chased by members of the public after they noticed that a man was pushed down from their vehicle after robbing him of his valuables.
It read, “They drove recklessly in order to evade arrest before they were eventually caught by LASTMA officials controlling and managing traffic around the Abule-Egba axis.
“The two suspects were later handed over to the policemen from the Ile-Epo Police Division for further investigation.”
In the statement, the General Manager of LASTMA, Bakare Oki, appealed to the public to be very vigilant and “stop boarding commercial buses by the roadside popularly called ‘So-le’.”
In the video posted by LASTMA on X (formerly Twitter), two of the robbers, while being interrogated, explained how they operate.
Speaking in Yoruba, one of them wearing a blue shirt explained how he removes phones from the pockets or bags of their victims. The man wearing the black top was also identified as the driver of the bus.
In June 2023, the Lagos State Police Command arrested a three-man, one-chance gang that had been terrorising unsuspecting commuters along the Oshodi-Gbagada axis of the state.
