The police in India have arrested a Nigerian, Chukwu Ogbonna David, who allegedly uses fake passports and changes his name to evade security arrests over drugs peddling and other crimes.
The officials said creating fake Nigerian passports on fictitious names helped the drug suspect, ‘Tony’, from coming under the radar of India’s Telangana police in the last three years, Nigeria Abroad reports.
When his two accomplices were caught by Indian law enforcement in 2019 for allegedly being in possession of cocaine, they disclosed their handler’s name as SK Chukwu, which itself was not Tony’s actual name.
Later, Tony created another fake passport with a fake visa under the name Danny Chukwu, police say, adding that the latest name by which he was introduced to others was Tony Marsha.
“From a previous arrested accomplice of Tony, we got his photograph. When investigators showed him the picture, Tony outrightly (sic) denied that the person in the photograph was him. He tried to show a mole on the face of the person in the photograph which he did not have. But later, he admitted it was him in the photograph,” an official said.
Police officials say whenever Tony’s agents were arrested for peddling drugs, he would immediately change his name and create a new fake passport besides shifting to a different city temporarily to conceal his identity.
“He feared that he might get caught and was always in possession of a fake passport as a proof of identity on which his name would be different. This was primarily to deceive and give the slip to police. He knows how security agencies react during police investigations and used to take precautions accordingly,” police officials say.
On his original passport, his name is Chukwu Ogbonna David, but investigators found that the passport expired in 2015. He, however, claimed that it got misplaced.
Tony visited Hyderabad in 2018 and 2019 and stayed briefly in Tolichowki area though he was based in Bengaluru at that time.
