Fraudster offers to double money with magic potion

Police have arrested a man who claimed he could hatch money from eggs using a magic potion made from pigeon and mermaid's blood. Police received a tipoff on May 1 that a Nigerian was offering to double people's money using black magic.

Two undercover policemen arranged to meet him on May 2 and asked him to demonstrate the doubling of a Dh500 note to show it could be done, so that they could give him more to be doubled. Accordingly, one of the officers met him again in a hotel at 1am.

The man arrived with a sack and took the Dh500 note. He picked up incense sticks, a small steel container and two bottles filled with a liquid which he said was the blood of a mermaid. He uttered some unintelligible words while sprinkling the contents of the two bottles on the floor and on three eggs.

He took a pigeon from his sack and started plucking its feathers and throwing them on the floor. He then asked the client to accompany him to wash the pigeon and the eggs. When they came back into the room, the African suffocated the pigeon and sprinkled its blood on the Dh500 note, the eggs, the feathers and the steel container.

He then broke the eggs with his foot and in one of them was a Dh500 note. A police team rushed into the room and arrested the African, identified as Abdul Hakeem Mohammed Ali. "He admitted that he had replaced one of the eggs with another in which he had placed the Dh500 note," police said.