11 PDP Senators defect to APC

11 PDP Senators defect to APC

According to a report by Sahara Reporters, 11 PDP senators have defected to the All Progressive Congress APC. A formal letter to this effect has been handed to the Senate President, David Mark, and would be read to the general house this afternoon.

The defected senators are:
Senator Bukola Saraki-Kwara Central.
Senator Umaru Dahiru-Sokoto South

Senator Magnus Ngei Abe -Rivers South-East
Senator Wilson Asinobi Ake-Rivers  West
Sen. Bindawa Muhammed Jibrilla-Adamawa North
 Sen. Mohammed Danjuma Goje-Gombe central
Sen. Aisha Jummai Alhassan-Taraba North
Sen. Mohammed Ali Ndume-Borno South
Senator Mohammed Shaba Lafiaji-Kwara North
Sen. Abdulahi Adamu-Nasarawa West
Senator Ibrahim Abdullahi Gobir-Sokoto East

What does Bola Tinubu want?

OVER the past few years, Bola Tinubu has made himself something of a colossus of South-Western politics in Nigeria.  Against the onslaught of vociferous PDP electoral manipulations in 2003, Tinubu drew the line in the sand and held on to the biggest prize: Lagos.  He became, in effect, the lone survivor of his party in the South-West.  By 2007, using just Lagos State as his stronghold, he fought back to wrest ACN control back in all but one of the South-western states.  By 2011, he had consolidated his hold in the region.  With 2015 looming, it would appear to be high time for Tinubu to unfold a national, as opposed to a merely regional, agenda.

Accordingly, Tinubu has now become the grandfather of the All Progressives Congress (APC); a coalition forged between his ACN party, Buhari’s CPC, the ANPP and Rochas Okorocha’s wing of APGA.  But the question needs to be asked: what is in this new-fangled APC for Bola Tinubu?

Politics without principles

Tinubu’s midwifery of the APC is conclusive proof he is anything but a progressive politician.  The APC is an all-comers alliance of strange bedfellows without any defined policy objectives.  No one can tell what is progressive about this new cocktail.  Former arch-enemies of the ruling PDP, hitherto derided as corrupt and incompetent by Tinubu, are now courted and welcomed in APC with open arms.

Since 1999, Obasanjo has been Tinubu’s public enemy number one.  In 2011, Tinubu said: “(Obasanjo) should go away and retire in shame politically. He brought a whole salad of corruption, manipulation and failures.”  However, more recently, Tinubu was part of a delegation of APC leaders who visited Obasanjo at his residence in Otta, pleading with him to decamp from the PDP to the APC.  The nation watched with incredulity as Tinubu was quoted as saying to arch-enemy Obasanjo: “We’re resolved and determined to rescue Nigeria. We want you as navigator.”

Such duplicity is par for the course with Tinubu.  He cut his political teeth as a NADECO politician in the heydays of the annulled June 1993 elections.  In consonance with his NADECO colleagues, Tinubu is on record in insisting repeatedly that: “Because of the multiple issues surrounding our skewed federalism and constitutional flaws, the Nigerian nation is weak…  We must convoke a national conference.”  Fast-forward to 2013, after President Jonathan decided to convene the requested national conference, Tinubu started singing a different tune.  He declared: “The national conference is by whom, for whom, and at what stage?  How many levels of deception?  I see a contradiction.  I see diversion.  I see deception, lack of honesty and integrity.”

The contradiction, deception and lack of honesty that is evident to all are on the part of Bola Tinubu.

South-West control

Tinubu has controlled South-West politics not because he is popular in the region, but because he has been allowed to get away with anti-democratic tendencies.  His ACN party made no pretenses to be democratic.   Candidates for elective offices did not come from any democratic processes; they were chosen in Tinubu’s bedroom.  There was only one discernible requirement for qualification: total allegiance to Tinubu and the acceptance to do his bidding.

It is to Tinubu’s credit that the candidates he chose undemocratically have tended to do better than others.  Justifying himself, Tinubu said: “I play god-fatherism in the South-West for the good of our people.  My god-fatherism is for progress.”  However, his blatant “all in the family” nepotism can hardly be said to be in the interest of the South-West.  Tinubu crowned his daughter the new Iyaloja of Lagos.  He installed his wife, as a Senator for Lagos State.  His wife’s sister is apparently a member of Lagos State House of Assembly.  His daughter’s husband is a member of the Federal House of Representatives.  This is unacceptable.

The APC is likely to produce a Northern candidate to compete against Goodluck Jonathan in 2015.  Tinubu calls himself the leader of the APC, and his alliance partners seem readily inclined to humour him with that inconsequential title for the time-being.  But as the so-called leader of the new coalition, he is not going to be able to handpick the presidential candidate in the same undemocratic way he does in the South-West.  One thing is for sure, that decision will not take place in Tinubu’s bedroom.

In 2011, President Jonathan supported Mulikat Akande of Oyo State for the position of Speaker of House of Representatives.  But Tinubu corralled ACN representatives to defeat his candidature in favour of Aminu Tambulwal of Sokoto.  He did this so he can play a South-West marginalization card against Jonathan’s PDP government in subsequent elections.  He was also mindful that a Yoruba Speaker should not provide a rallying point for the PDP in the struggle for supremacy with his ACN in the South-West.

Rigging democracy

By 2011, Tinubu’s ACN already had twelve years experience of perfected vote-rigging in the South-west.  No matter what INEC says or does, the elections could always be relied on to conform to Tinubu’s permutations.  The South-West public was not particularly bothered about this because the ACN was preferred to the only other viable alternative; the PDP.  But with ACN now merged into the APC, we have a new political dynamic especially at the national level.  The question that now arises is this: Can South-Western votes be successfully rigged in favour of a Northern presidential candidate, according to the requirements of Tinubu’s new APC alliance?  I doubt it very much.

Let me say something here about the peculiarities of Nigeria’s “rigging democracy.”  In Nigeria, every election is rigged.  The question is to what extent or to what degree.  Nigeria’s rigging rigmarole also has some paradoxically inbuilt democratic tendencies.  The capacity to rig and get away with it is linked to actual support on the ground.  In short, the efficacy of rigging lies in the ability to exaggerate the margin of victory.  Put in the national mix, this might conceivably distort and even determine the eventual outcome.  But when an election is rigged to the extent that the eventual winner in a particular constituency bears no relation with the real choice on the ground, it is likely to result in riots and protests.

The South-west is still the only region in Nigeria that votes ethnically.  In the history of Nigeria’s democratic experience, the North has voted for Southerners.  The South-East and the South-South have voted for Northerners.  But the South-West has never voted for a Northerner.  Therefore, Tinubu is going to have a problem convincing South-West voters that they vote for a Northerner in 2015 if, as is true to form, they are not inclined to do so.

Northern APC president

Tinubu’s political career would be greatly endangered were he to presume he can, at his discretion, manipulate South-West votes for a Northern presidential candidate.  Should he make that mistake, he might just end up as another Samuel Ladoke Akintola of South-Western politics, accused of selling out his people to the North.  The outcome of that in 1964 was widespread rioting in the West, which prefaced the 1966 military coup.

For his APC alliance with Buhari to work, Tinubu would have to become what he is not: a democrat.  He will have to convince South-West voters to vote for a Northerner.  That will require a lot of leg-work and campaigning that has not even started, with the elections only one year away.  Even then, it is not likely to work.  When Tinubu chose Ribadu, a Northerner, as the ACN presidential flag-bearer in 2011, Ribadu still did not receive South-Western votes.  The votes went, instead, to Goodluck Jonathan of the PDP and the South-South

Moreover, a Northern president portends nothing but disaster for Tinubu’s political ambitions.  No president of Nigeria will kowtow to him the way his South-Western governors currently do.  Tinubu might want to learn from the experience of the “navigator” of PDP politics; Olusegun Obasanjo.  That “navigation” came to grief once Yar’Adua became president; and then again, once Goodluck Jonathan was installed in Aso Rock.

Therefore, if Tinubu has ears, he should use them.  The Northern politicians clamouring for power after being starved of it for 16 years are not dying to do any favours for the South-West, given the eight years of Obasanjo’s presidency.  They are dying to do favours for themselves.  Once a Northern president is firmly installed in Aso Rock, they are going to stop returning Tinubu’s phone-calls.

Vice-president Tinubu

Of course, one way out is to balance the APC ticket with a Yoruba vice-presidential candidate.  However, Tinubu himself is not viable in that capacity.  I daresay, Nigeria is not ready for Vice-President Tinubu.  I know of no great desire in the land for the nation’s economy to be mortgaged to the Tinubu family according to the format currently prevailing in Lagos especially where, among other sharp practices, his Alpha Beta outfit gets a fixed percentage of all internally-generated revenue.

One of the more plausible configurations I have heard is a Kwankwaso/Fashola ticket designed to bring into the APC mix the two more popular governors of the two most populous states.  However, Tinubu may have a problem with that because it will signal his death-knell politically.  A Yoruba vice-president would be an even greater threat to Tinubu’s South-West supremacy than his earlier fears of a Yoruba Speaker.

In any case, in Nigeria, nobody votes for a vice-president, even though he is on the ballot.  Everyone knows that a vice-president plays second-fiddle to the president.  He is only as relevant, or as inconsequential, as the president wants him to be.  With all the clamour at the moment by the Northern political elite for a Northern president, it is easily forgotten that the current vice-president is actually from the North.  This is because the vice-presidency is not the issue.  The critical factor is the presidency.

This, therefore, is my position.  The APC adventure marks the end of the road politically for Tinubu.  It is downhill all the way for him from now on.  The very things that made Tinubu successful in the South-West are bound to shipwreck him in the APC.

- See more at: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2014/01/bola-tinubu-want/#sthash.Z33Dunk8.dpuf

Death Penalty Proposed For Fatal Cyber-Crimes In 2013 Cyber Crime Bill 

A death sentence has been proposed on persons who hack into the Critical National Information Infrastructure or computer networks resulting in the loss of lives.

The proposal is contained in the Cyber Crime Bill 2013, which is before the House of Representatives.

However, where there is no loss of lives but the offender causes “grievous bodily injury” to another person, the bill recommends a prison term of not less than 15 years.

Using any computer network for terrorism purposes also attracts life sentence.

The bill defines Critical National Information Infrastructure as “certain computer systems, networks and information infrastructure vital to the national security of Nigeria or the economy and social well-being of its citizens.”

The bill frowns on child Indecency, as it imposes a 10-year jail term for offenders or a fine of N20million or both.

The bill criminalises the use of force to engage children in intimate activities.

Offenders are liable to being convicted to 10 years imprisonment or a fine of N15m.

http://www.punchng.com/news/jonathan-seeks-death-penalty-for-cyber-crime/

Yetunde Akilapa, actress accused of stealing recounts her ordeal

Yetunde Akilapa, actress accused of stealing recounts her ordeal

The Nollywood actress in the middle of theft scandal (Read it here), Yetunde Akilapa, narrates her side of the story in an interview with Encomium magazine. She says the whole incident on January 12 was a mystery to her but she has been delivered by God.

It's a long interview so I'll only type out where she talked about what really happened. Excepts below

How did the incidence of January 12 2014 happen. It was reported that you were caught in the dining room of a house in Magodo, and the owner of the house met you there with suspicion that you are there for the wrong reasons. Can you shed more light on the story?
That day I wanted to take my clothes to dry-cleaners. Meanwhile my younger sister had told me earlier that she was not feeling fine. I now planned to go her place after dropping my clothes. I told my friend whom I was putting up with in Ketu that I wanted to go to Bariga to see my sister. That day I also wanted to go to church but I didnt know what happened to me. I just decided to forget about church. As I wanted to board a bus to Bariga, something told me to cross to the other side of the road and take keke NAPEP going to Magodo. That was how I boarded the keke going to Magodo with my bag, clothes and four keys on me. On getting to Magodo, I saw a house and went there straight. I didn't see any gateman there. I opened the door because it wasnt locked. I entered the house and slept off in the dining room. That's all I knew till one man just woke me up.

Photos: Bus burns on Third Mainland bridge

Photos: Bus burns on Third Mainland bridge

 

A 14-seater bus is reported to have gone up in flames at Iyana Oworosoki. This accident has caused a standstill on the ever busy bridge. Unconfirmed reports say one person died. Another pic after the cut

Photo: President Jonathan & CBN Governor mend fences at Davos

Photo: President Jonathan & CBN Governor mend fences at Davos

About 3 weeks ago, it was reported that President Jonathan had asked CBN Governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi to resign. (If you missed it, read it here). But it seems the two have mended fences by the look of the pic above, taken a few days ago at Davos, Switzerland.

Real life story of an Indiana house haunted by 200 demons

Real life story of an Indiana house haunted by 200 demons

Latoya Ammons (pictured left) moved into a home with her mother and 3 children in Gary, Indiana in 2011 and started hearing footsteps in the basement. Over time, she and her children, aged 12, 9 and 8, became 'possessed'; their eyes would bulge, they'd shake and growl. A clairvoyant said the home was haunted by 200 demons. Sons were taken to hospital after one was inexplicably thrown in the house. While there a nurse and a CPS worker saw him walk backwards up a wall. Full story below..

It is a clear, calm voice – a whisper that cuts across the voices of the Indiana police officers recording proceedings.

‘Hey’ – a simple word rendered chilling because nobody present in the basement that day said it, much less heard it, at the time.

None of the police officers sent to investigate claims of supernatural occurrences, possession and paranormal activity at a modest rental home in Gary, Indiana in spring 2012 really believed this could be anything other than a hoax. None of them thought that they would be descending into ‘a portal to hell.’

But today that is exactly what Gary Indiana police captain Charles Austin (pictured above) believes the basement of Latoya Ammons’s former family home contained.

Speaking to MailOnline he said: ‘Everyone of us who was there that day in the basement and who saw what we saw, went through what we went through after…we all think the same, we all call it the same. That bit of dirt is a portal to hell.
'I came into work on the Monday and asked my sergeant if anything had occurred out of the ordinary over the weekend. He told me that there had been a contact by a party in reference to a house in Carolina Street where the mother was living with three children and her mother, their grandmother.’

Since the news of the so-called possession and exorcism of Latoya Ammons broke the story has been met with intense skeptism by some and unwavering belief by others. But no-one can remain unmoved or unsettled by this odd, alarming tale.
MailOnline has spoken with the key officials involved in the investigation at its very beginning and the exorcism in which it culminated. And both men – one of the law, one of the cloth – admit to having followed that same arch of disbelief giving way to horrified credence.

When Capt Austin heard of it that Monday afternoon his sergeant told him that Child Protection Services were involved. 
The children had been missing school and had been removed from their mother’s care but both Latoya Ammons and her mother Rose Campbell insisted that the wrong at the heart of their household was supernatural in nature.
Capt Austin said: ‘The sergeant told me that the children had been missing school and there was talk of satanic goings on. He was very leery of it. I contacted some people, high-ranking officers; we decided to take a look.

‘I walked in there thinking this was nothing but a hoax, a concocted story.’
Instead what he experienced that day in the spring of 2012 shook him to his core, threatened his life and became part of the documented history of one of the most disturbing and baffling cases in Indiana’s police history.
That voice - picked up by a police tape recorder as Capt Austin and his colleagues recorded their tour around the house with a growing sense of unease – was either a welcome or a challenge, according to Capt Austin, 62, but whatever it was, it was not human.
Capt Austin’s assertions were echoed by Roman Catholic priest Father Michael Maginot, also interviewed by MailOnline.

Cops and child protection workers were also spooked during visits to the home in Gary, Indiana (pictured). In this image, a figure appears in a window, right, although no one was home

A close-up of the image shows the cloudy white figure in the window of the home

Most of the problems at the home were around the basement stairs, pictured. Police dug a four foot hole under the stairs to look for graves

Father Maginot may be a more natural candidate to believe in supernatural phenomenon than a cop of 37 years' standing who prides himself in being an ‘aggressive and assertive law enforcer.’ 

But, like Capt Austin, he set out to disprove the story forwarded by Latoya Ammons and her mother Rose. Instead he would conduct one minor and three major exorcisms on the mother of three and told MailOnline that he himself had been the target of demonic attack for his involvement in the case.

Over a six-month period Latoya claims that she and her children were possessed by demons. She says that the house in which they lived was ravaged by malevolent spirits, that her daughter, then 12, and sons, 9 and 7 respectively were physically attacked – thrown against furniture, dragged from the sofa, punched and tormented till their gums and noses bled and they struggled to breath. 

As a family she says they fell ill – she to three kidney infections, her children to a variety of ailments and disturbances. She says the house ‘dripped oil,’ that shadowy figures walked the rooms at night, that footsteps could be heard coming up from the basement only to be followed by a furious pounding on the door leading form it to the main house when, in increasing terror, she and her mother put a lock on it.

 Father Maginot says he set out to disprove the claims but instead became utterly convinced of them

There were swarms of dead horseflies on the porch – swept up one day only to return in equal abundance the next. Lights flickered, phones played up, television signals scrambled and reverted to normal on a whim.

In short, she claims, the family was terrorized beyond all endurance. And the impact in school-time lost and medical treatment sought saw the Department of Child Protection Services step in and call in first he police, and finally after one particularly harrowing event, Father Maginot.

Sitting before the fire in the main room of St Stephen the Martyr’s rectory in Merrillville, Indiana Father Maginot admitted he only became involved by chance. He happened to be covering for the usual chaplain of Gary ER on the weekend when a medic called in some distress to report a bizarre occurrence.

He said: ‘We were having our bible study after mass when I got the call saying “You’re a Catholic priest. You do exorcisms. We need you to do one.” They went onto tell me that a little boy had just walked, glided, backwards up a wall and flipped over to land on his feet.
‘They said he was growling, they described all sorts of things. I went of course.’

Father Maginot speaks rapidly and earnestly. He is affable, open and welcoming but he is no fool. He set out, he insisted, to disprove any notion of the occult. To do an exorcism permission is needed from the Bishop and, to be frank, he admitted he was reluctant to go down that path having approached Bishop Dale J Melczek, Bishop of Gary some years earlier on another matter involving possible supernatural events only to receive short shrift.

 He said: ‘I set out to disprove it because to be honest I didn’t want to get the bishop involved. But I had policemen, social workers, doctors and security guards telling me what they had witnessed.
‘I couldn’t just dismiss them all. That was a Friday. So I met with the mother and grandmother on the Sunday.’

n an involvement with the case spanning five months Fr Maginot never met or examined any of the children.

 But he became convinced, he said, that Latoya was indeed possessed and that the house in which she and her children lived had become cursed as a result of a hex placed on her.
Shaking his head, aware perhaps of how unbelievable the story, he admitted; ‘I think there was a curse placed on the mother, that she was the focus possibly by an ex-boyfriend or his wife and that that combined with some tragedy and perhaps occult practices that had taken place in that house before and that had opened a portal.’
It is the conclusion Capt Austin has drawn against every logical thought that told him that just could not be true.

Speaking from Gary Police Department Headquarters, he has run every department from narcotics to homicide, gang intelligence to autodetail. He has taught 500 officers and received the department’s highest reward for his service. He doesn’t believe in the sort of ‘garbage’ he thought he was being fed in by the two women at Caroline Street in Gary two spring’s ago.

He said: ‘I was skeptical. I was leading the pack through the house. We walked in and the first thing we see is in the living room there’s a candle burning and a bible and a little altar with a crucifix – same in every room in the house. There was a drawing on the refrigerator done by one of the boys that was Jesus on the cross but behind him there looked like demonic figures.’

There were similar drawings elsewhere he recalled. He sat as Latoya’s mother, Rose, told him how the Venetian blinds would get wet and appear to drip oil, that the basement door would open and close and that they heard a dog barking sometimes and scratching.

Capt. Austin listened but, he said, ‘I thought it was a joke.’
But the further into the house he investigated the less comfortable he felt. Things just seemed ‘odd.’ 

He said: ‘Underneath the stairs was dirt and a candle. I was trying to figure out what was going on there because the rest of the basement was cement.
‘I took pictures of the candles and crucifix under the stairs on the dirt.’
Those pictures, taken on his iPhone, subsequently disappeared he said and the phone which he used that day never behaved the same again.

But before those images disappeared, he said, he saw that they contained figures he had not seen before; figures he said were not there before, standing around him and beneath the stairs.
According to Capt. Austin: ‘The officer behind me took pictures of me standing in front of him and in his pictures he saw lots of figures too.’
With the practiced narration of an experienced witness, Capt. Austin continued: ‘I said, “Enough of this garbage.” On leaving the property I went to a gas station and made a phone call. 
‘I had my police radio, my squad car dash AM/FM radio, my police cell and my iPhone. I was looking at the pictures I had taken on my iPhone when I made this call and all of a sudden this growling voice came from my AM/FM radio.
‘It said, “YOU OUTTA HERE” Then a lot of garbled other stuff and static.’
The memory clearly disturbs the veteran officer to this day. He said: ‘I’m thinking something is seriously wrong here.’

Later he called his fellow officer who told him, ‘Those pictures that we took under the stairs, there’s silhouettes of other people under the stairs with you.’
After that, according to Capt. Austin, every other officer present that day had problems with their radios, phones and house alarms.

Most alarming for Capt. Austin was an incident he had two weeks later when he was, he said bluntly, ‘attacked.’

Returning home in his Infiniti SUV he said, ‘the electric door to my garage would not open. It had been fine before. I pressed the keypad it must have been 10 times then gave up.

‘I exited the vehicle and went to flip the main power in the garage but that didn’t work, then the house and finally that worked.
‘But when I went back to my car the drivers seat was just moving backwards and forwards by itself. Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards.
‘When I took the car to the shop to get it looked into they said if I hadn’t brought it in it could have caused an accident and I could have been killed because for some reason the seat was about to collapse.’

The next time Capt. Austin was in the house it was with Father Maginot several weeks later. 

They brought a dog, thinking perhaps they would find a crime scene, perhaps human remains, that might account for the disturbances but the dogs found nothing.
The men dug, five foot down into the dirt in the basement and unearthed a bizarre collection of objects: boys’ socks with the ankle portion cut out, a fake fingernail, women’s panties, a heavy, corroded iron weight, a broken plastic shoe horn and a red oval kettle lid. 

Household trash? Or objects ritualistically buried in an attempt to summon something up or keep something at bay? 
By then even the most level-headed present were open to the latter explanation and several of the people who had visited the house on the first inspection, including the original CPS case worker, had become so shaken by the day and its aftermath that they refused to go back.

Now that the Ammons family have moved out the new tenants claim they have had no problems, certainly not any of demonic possession

Father Maginot’s experience of the exorcisms of Latoya Ammons is similarly unnerving.

He met with Latoya and her mother at the house and, he said, for two hours they conducted an interview without any incident.

The women told him what they claimed was going on – the footsteps, the pounding, sometimes an animal growling, the horseflies, the youngest boy was often found talking to another boy whom no-one else could see and then there was the jarringly horrible tale of an ‘old woman with red eyes’ who disappeared as suddenly as she had appeared to the children in the yard one day.

He said: ‘Only the children saw definite figures but the grandmother saw a shadow of a man and they would find dirty footsteps in the front from in the morning just paced to and fro and going nowhere.

‘Ghostly things are easier to deal with,’ said Father Maginot, explaining, ‘A lot of the time as Catholics you can have a mass, pray for them, tell them to go into the light, not to be afraid. But demons are different. You're inviting in guests from other realms and they don't necessarily want to leave.'’

During his visit to the Carolina Street house Father Maginot said that among the many strange phenomenon he witnessed were walls dripping with oil, Venetian blind rods tilting from side to side in unison and apparently for no reasons, seemingly set footprints appearing on the floor.
Lights repeatedly flickered then stopped when approached in such a way that the priest became convinced this was ‘an intelligence’ not simply an electric fault.
The final straw, the family told him, was when they were sitting as a family watching television and a bottle of Febreeze floated up, moved to and fro in the air before being hurled into Latoya’s room, smashing a lamp. In the aftermath they saw the shadow of a man. 

They left the house for a hotel that night and never returned to live there again.
A clairvoyant who had visited the house and told Latoya she saw ‘hundreds of demons’ in the basement had told her to anoint the house with oil and put salt down to seal the gateways to demons.

Father Maginot did the same during his visit uttering blessings and trying, at every turn, to find a logical explanation for the things he was seeing and the things these women were telling him. But increasingly he struggled.

He said: ‘I was trying to find a focus for it, to understand where it was coming from because that can help solve these things.’

Father Maginot became convinced that Latoya’s former lover was a ‘trigger’ or possible ‘source.’ Every time he asked her about this man – who is not the father of any of the children – Latoya complained of more symptoms of the possession, fever, cold, headaches, nausea and convulsions.
He said: ‘After almost four hours when she was going through one of these moments I took my crucifix and put it to her forehead and she began convulsing.

‘I had thought the demons were with the kids but now I could see they were with her. She was the source. They jumped from her and they jumped from child to child – they would pick up each other’s chants, or convulse in turn, act crazy, or growl in turn. But they were with her.

‘I said, that’s enough. We’re not prepared to do an exorcism here but I’ve got enough there’s no need to torture anyone.’
Instead on June 1, 8th and 29th Latoya came to St Stephen the Martyr, Church in Merrillville and submitted to three major exorcisms.

She had, by then, moved out of the Carolina Street house in Gary and was living in a new apartment in Illinois.  At the time the children were in state care but they have since been returned to their mother and grandmother’s.

Father Maginot recalled: ‘I carried out the first exorcism in English and there was no incident. It was like it had already gone but they do say they play possum.’
Father Maginot gave Latoya a crucifix and a rosary made of Benedictine medals. As she left the church the rosary ripped into five pieces.

Father Maginot said: ‘I said, “I don’t think we’re done here.”’
Later Latoya reported to the priest that the corpus, the figure of Christ on the crucifix he had given her, had similarly been torn off.

'I had to figure out how to provoke the demons and drive them out,’ Father Maginot said, rocking to and fro in his easy chair.
Latoya had researched names and felt two belonged to her demons. Father Maginot will not repeat either - one is a biblical name, other is not – because he does not want to risk calling them.

He explained: ‘It’s a very personal thing. Once you have their name, it’s as though you have them caught. They like to work in mystery and darkness. Once you shine a light you show their limitations and they don’t like that.’
As if to prove that point Father Maginot recalled how he was ‘attacked by demons’ the day before the second exorcism. 

Out riding his bike a series of near accidents and unsettling moments climaxed with him being seemingly spontaneously thrown from the saddle of his bike into the grass at the side of the bicycle path he was following.

He said: ‘I looked and saw that the seat of my bike was completely twisted but it made no sense because it was absolutely tight and I had to really pound it to straighten it out. I was in no doubt I had been attacked. I was being warned.’
The second exorcism saw a more violent response. The exorcism is, Father Maginot explained, a ritual repeated over and over, with the priest narrowing in on the demon and its triggers. 

He said: ‘You try to protect yourself as much as you can. You go to confession because if there are any unconfessed sins it will use that.

‘It will use anything possible to deflect, or distract or scare you.
‘You will think you’re torturing the person but you’re not. You’re torturing the demon.’
The final exorcism was in Latin – praising God and condemning the demon.
‘The parts that were praising God there was no reaction from Latoya,’ Father Maginot recalled. ‘The parts condemning the demon she convulsed which was interesting to me as she doesn’t know Latin.’
Latoya said she felt herself being pulled up as if to levitate but Father Maginot saw no sign of that.
After third exorcism Latoya fell asleep he recalled. He gave her the now mended rosary and she took it home with her. 

‘I never heard from her again,’ he said. ‘I was anticipating more. I was anticipating another at least but it turned out the game was over.'
After the final exorcism Father Maginot visited the house and blessed it with what he referred to as a 'more serious blessing.' He said: 'This involved incense and salt and Holy Water.'
There were already new tenants in place and they had reported no problems since the priest had 'sealed' the portal with salt and blessings following an earlier investigation. 
But, he said, he told landlord Charles Reed, 'If we don't deal with this now, properly, this will not go away. This will close the portal and seal it.'

Father Maginot is in no doubt that the possession was real and that everything that happened to Latoya and her children and everything that others witnessed was the work of demons – fallen angels, God’s creatures turned against God and against man.

And for all his reluctance the same seems to be true of Capt. Austin. He said: ‘It shook me, everything to do with this. It shook me. This was a situation that was so out of my normal habitat. Did it shake me? Yes to a certain degree it did.