“I couldn’t believe that someone from Kogi will come and swindle smart minds Lagos is peopled with,” an official said after receiving calls from some of the people the sachet water hawker had a deal with to either get their own share of “N25m proceeds of the fraud” or else they would expose her.
The Government of Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, has handed over 26-year-old homeless amputee and single mother, Mary Daniel, who came to limelight after her pictures surfaced online, to the Nigerian Police, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO) and other agencies after discovering her true identity.
Daniel was handed over to the traditional leader and other agencies with about N25 million in her private account when the government discovered that the stories earlier narrated by the amputee were conflicting coupled with strange calls coming from people suspected to be those that she worked for before her discovery.
The actions of the state government became necessary after investigations revealed that the amputee was not telling a true story about herself and the life she had been living before helps from the public and government intervention came to her ways.
“I couldn’t believe that someone from Kogi will come and succesfully swindle smart minds Lagos is peopled with. What this shows is that as smart or red-eyed as people in Lagos can be, they ate still the most compassionate set of people, and that is exactly what Daniel has come to take advantage of,” an official of the state government told Platforms Africa.
It was learnt that some of the people the sachet water hawker had a deal with have been calling to demand their own share of the donations Daniels had received from the public or else they would expose her.
A source in the Lagos State Government who spoke under anonymity condition disclosed that Daniel claims that she was an orphan and that the parents died during an accident were not true and that her situations in Oshodi were allegedly staged.
The source narrated that during interrogations, it was discovered that the amputee’s father was still alive contrary to Daniel’s initial claim that she lost both parents during an accident several years back.
Also after several hours of investigation into her story, the official added that it was discovered that the sachet water hawker’s mother truly died but was not through an auto crash as earlier narrated by Daniel after arriving Oshodi where she was discovered last month..
She hinted that Punch reporters and other media organisations that had reported Daniel story felt betrayed and that were not motivated to further pick any development concerning the amputee.
