Jaiyeola was reportedly nabbed by operatives of the Rapid Response Squad (RRS), a back pack around on Ozumba Mbadiwe Road, in the Victoria Island area of the state and on searching the bag, the items were found and that was when he only began pretending to be mentally challenged after the items were discovered from him.

The police said they were not convinced that the 39-year-old Jaiyeola was actually mad, adding that initially, he was lucid before he started talking illogically.

One of the RRS men said:

“When we sighted him, he appeared like a mentally-ill man, but we invited him for interrogation. He responded normally to all our enquiries.

A few minutes into the interrogation, he started straying from the normal course of our enquiries and was not making sense at all. This raised further curiosity and we decided to search his backpack.

Inside the backpack, we found 22 ATM cards, one Nokia phone, a BlackBerry, a power bank, several bank tellers of recent bank transactions, and lots of invoices hidden in pieces of papers.”

It was learnt that eight of the credit cards were still valid, and they had different names and banks, prompting the officers to arrest him and take him to their base in Alausa, Ikeja.

One of the officers that initially interrogated Jaiyeola said he was only pretending to be mad.

“While interrogating him, he threatened the Investigating Police Officer, saying, ‘I will make life unbearable for you if you don’t let me go’.

It was at this point we realised that possibly he might be enjoying the patronage of some highly-placed people whom we believe he was working for.”