Alhaji Umaru Dikko ,
became a household name in Britain and Nigeria in the summer of 1984 when men said to be from
the Israeli secret service ‘Mossad’ and the Nigerian government of the day
conspired to kidnap him in a large wooden crate.
During the second republic
(1979-83), Dikko played prominent roles in the government,
as special adviser to President Sheu Shagari, transport minister and head of
the presidential task force on rice. After the military coup on 31 December
1983, the Shagari government was overthrown, Dikko then fled into exile in
London.
The new
military regime accused him of large-scale corruption while in office as head
of the presidential task force on rice in particular of embezzling millions of
dollars from the nation’s oil revenues. The
accusations he denied.
On the 5th
July, 1984, Dikko was seized outside his
house in London, bundled into a van and taken to Stansted Airport in Essex,
where a Nigerian Boeing 707 cargo aircraft waited to repatriate him to face
charges of corruption brought against him in Lagos. His captors handcuffed him,
drugged him, and stuffed him in chains into the crate with a doctor by his side
maintaining a tube to keep him breathing.
According to report, the
doctor and another of his captors, a diamond trader, were Israelis; the other
two, a Nigerian ex-army major and a Tunisian-born shopkeeper. The other men
climbed into a second wooden crate. Only when all were waiting take-off did a
telephone call by suspicious British customs officers to the Foreign Office
discover that the two crates, each four and a half feet by five and a half in
size, did not have diplomatic clearance.
Customs officials were
told to open the crates in the presence of an official Nigerian government
representative. The crates were searched and the men discovered. Dikko was
whisked to hospital in Bishop's Stortford, where he woke up unharmed after
remaining unconscious all night, and his captors arrested.
The doctor and the
shopkeeper were later sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment, the Israeli organizer
of the snatch to 14 years, and the Nigerian military man to 12 years. The men
lost appeals to have their sentences reduced.
Neither Nigeria nor Israel
ever admitted taking part in the only-just-thwarted effort to avoid the
time-consuming process of securing Dikko's extradition to Nigeria, but both countries
were referred to in Parliament as having been involved, for reasons that would
remain shrouded in mystery. The Nigerian High commissioner was expelled from
Britain and two expatriate British engineers working in Nigeria were accused of
stealing an aircraft. They were sentenced to 14 years' imprisonment, and for
the next few years relations between Britain and Nigeria were frosty. The two
were freed three years later.
Dikko told an interviewer
two months after his ordeal: "I was warned all the time... but I had to
live. I had to go out." He remembered seeing his abductors staring at him:
"The stare sent a shock through me. I was on foot, alone... they grabbed
me and held me... they banged me against the van. I hurt my back."
"I remember the very violent way in which
I was grabbed and hurled into a van, with a huge fellow sitting on my head -
and the way in which they immediately put on me handcuffs and chains on my
legs," he told the BBC a year later.
The heroine of the moment
had been Dikko's secretary, Elizabeth Hayes, who saw the snatch and her boss
being put into a yellow van, and called police. She also managed to tell Dikko
by sending a message on his electronic pager, which he received just before
being chemically knocked out. "It was a great relief," Dikko said.
"Then they jabbed me [injected the drug] and sat on me." He later
added: "It was so tight it was as if a knife was cutting through my
wrists... They tied my hands and my ankles together. I was bent double."
He stayed in Britain until
being invited back to Nigeria by President Goodluck Jonathan under more clement
conditions. He was chairman of the disciplinary committee of the People's Democratic
Party of Nigeria. He died in London after a series of strokes. His son, Dr
Bello Dikko, survives him.
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