BENIN CITY, Nigeria — The Edo State Police Command has arrested a 42-year-old man, Ernest Ugbomoiko, for allegedly fabricating and circulating false reports claiming that bandits had kidnapped school children across multiple communities in the state.
The official arrest notification was made public on Thursday night, June 18, 2026, by the state command to restore public calm and dispel widespread anxiety among panic-stricken parents.
Okay News reports that fake distress alerts had rapidly spread on digital platforms, alleging coordinated mass abductions of students in Afuze, Ehor, Otuo, Agbede, and Igueben. To restore order, the Edo State Commissioner of Police, CP Monday Agbonika, authorized a swift investigation that tracked the source of the malicious misinformation directly to Ugbomoiko’s residence in the Afuze community.
State Police Public Relations Officer, ASP Eno Ikoedem, confirmed that exhaustive tactical security sweeps across the mentioned jurisdictions proved that no single student or school facility faced an operational breach. Ikoedem clarified that while the police command has intensified proactive security deployments and armed perimeters around vulnerable academic institutions nationwide, the presence of personnel was entirely preventive and unrelated to the false alarm. The command warned that the suspect will face strict criminal prosecution for spreading state-disrupting hoaxes, urging the public to aggressively verify sensitive security rumors before distributing them to family networks.
