EXPOSED: How women borrowed babies to deceive officials at Benue IDPs camp

The Benue State government says it has arrested 50 fake Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) at the temporary camp where people from Yelwata are taking refuge following the invasion of their community in Guma Local Government Area.

State Commissioner for Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management, Aondowase Kunde, made the disclosure during an interactive session with journalists in Makurdi, the state capital, at the weekend.

He said criminals had infiltrated the camp opened for victims at International Market located along George Akume way in Makurdi.

The commissioner expressed concerns that people from the host community and market women infiltrated the camp.

Kunde noted that the criminals on Friday night broke into the camp and stole some non-food items while market women also invaded the camp to buy off food items meant for displaced persons.

He said, “We have been having issues in the camp for the past two days and we discovered a lot of infiltrators in the camp and conducted investigation after the Thursday protest and discovered that criminals and people from the host community in Makurdi were behind the protest.

“So we resolved that we have to be at the camp by 4am today (Saturday) to fish out those criminals and then we discovered that they stole mattresses while they used the area where the fence collapsed to access the camp.

“We discovered that some market women have started coming to the camp to buy off rice and food items distributed to displaced persons.

“We also discovered that some women who were claiming  to be lactating mothers went out to borrow babies from outside to be able to access the camp when they discovered that the first set of people we attended to were pregnant women and lactating mothers.

“When these so called lactating mothers were asked to breast feed their babies, we discovered there was no milk coming out of their breast.”