Church worker arrested for blackmailing female members with nude pictures

Duru, who is a Madonna University dropout, was reported have been luring his victims to hotels and taking their pictures, which he used to blackmail them into giving him money.

According to Punch, the suspect was arrested by some police officials on Thursday, October 31, 2019, in the Surulere area of Lagos.

One of Duru's victims who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the suspect took her nude pictures and one belonging to another of his girlfriends at a hotel in Ijeshatedo, Surulere at gunpoint.

After the victim narrated her ordeal in the hands of Duru to Rapid Response Squad (RRS), Duru who resides in Oregun, Ikeja, was probed and in the course of the investigation, the police learnt that the suspect had been using the nude pictures of the victim to blackmail her for money.

It was gathered that Duru keeps the nude pictures of other girls, whom he lodged in hotels and his apartment in Ijeshatedo.

There was a growing suspicion that Duru also laced the drink of another girl with a sleeping drug as the photographs obtained from one of his mobile phones revealed.

The victim who narrated her ordeal claimed that she thought Duru’s friend was a waiter when the incident happened.

She said, “He brought out his phone and I asked my boyfriend what was going on, but he slapped me and told me to remove the blanket covering my body.

“I refused. He yanked it off my body and told me to cooperate. I refused again. He asked his friend for the gun, threatening that if I didn’t cooperate, they would waste me.

“His friend took several shots of my nudity. Both of them abandoned me in the hotel room afterwards.

“I asked him almost a week after what he wanted to do with my pictures and he told me that was the beginning.

“The following Saturday, he threatened to post the pictures on the Internet unless I paid N80,000 in order to delete them. I paid N10,000 with a promise to pay the balance later.

“After a week, his friend called and offered me another option of paying him N40,000 and a night out with him. I refused. He threatened that I would hear from them very soon.”

In his confessional statement, Duru stated that the victim who reported him to the police was his girlfriend. "We are members of the same church. We have been dating for almost two years. We were having breakup issues.

“So, I invited her to a hotel in Ijeshatedo. I excused myself and invited my friend, Frank Obinna, to meet me in the hotel. Obinna and I had planned this together. 

“The gun was a toy gun. Obinna entered the hotel room and held the lady at gunpoint. I told her to cooperate and strip naked for Obinna to take her pictures. We took seven different nude shots of her with my phone. I discharged her that day. That was in September.

“By early October, I called her to give me N80,000 or I would post the nude photographs on the Internet. She was only able to offer me N10,000, which she transferred into my brother’s account.

“Last week, Obinna called her again and requested N40,000. She promised to send something. She was a wonderful girl, who had been assisting me before the problem started. On many occasions, she had assisted me financially.”

The suspect, along with some of the exhibits recovered from him, has however been transferred to the State Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Department (SCIID), Panti, for further investigation.