Yakubu Busari
A renowned and prominent Lawyer in Jos the Plateau State Capital, Barr Sunny Odey has decried that the activities of desperate kidnappers who are looking for money for their Christmas celebrations whom he said are wreaking havoc virtually every night within Jos.
According to him, their ransom is anywhere between N300, 000 to N5 million. Reports from some of the victims show the group comprises of Muslim Fulani youths in cahoots with their fellow Christian youths.
Until now, these youths were mortal enemies, the Muslim youths attacking Christian communities and senselessly massacring innocent folks, while the Christian youths retaliated by ravaging Muslim communities. Some of these youths have now joined forces to kidnap for ransom.
They are fearless. Armed with insider information, they visit homes in the middle of the night and break in and cart away their victims including any available cash. Yesterday they broke into a house around shinco areas and kidnapped a woman.
A while ago, around Guratok, in one night they broke into three houses and grabbed two victims, the third house had a back-escape route which the family escaped through while the kidnappers were trying to break in. The third victim that night was a woman who was returning from night vigil and ran into them; her family paid close to a million for her freedom.
Around the Rayfield area, the brother of a prominent individual held a birthday party for his daughter. They gate-crashed the party and made away with the daughter.
A man living with his wife, who is a nurse, in Rububa road was visited by the herdsmen.
They broke into the house and grabbed the man. As they led him through the alleyways, the man, who knew the environment better than them, managed to escape.
They were not deterred. They merely went back to the house and seized the wife – different outcomes, same ransom.
An Engineer around Rantiya had received a cash advance for the construction of greenhouses, and sure enough, that night, the kidnappers showed up. Being a wise Engineer he had built his house with an ultra-secret back escaped channel. So as the kidnappers began breaking down the door to his house, he gathered his family and cash and shooed them out through the secret escape channel. As they emerged outside the compound to freedom, sure enough, the second gang of Fulani herdsmen was waiting for them.
They were taken back to the house, the cash seized and negotiations began even before two of the engineer’s kids were carted away. The head of the gang was not a Fulani and was fully masked. He listed the land and property owned by the Engineer and demanded a ransom of ten million as they departed.
Finally, a struggling civil servant, who is a fire officer, laboured for years to build his small three-bedroom flat. When he was looking for a piece of land to begin construction, he put safety first as the number one priority. So he found the land behind the Jos police staff college. Not long after he moved into his new house, he was visited by the kidnappers and taken away. There were a lot of gunshots that night, but no one came to the rescue of the hapless fire officer. His wife had to raise several hundreds of thousands naira to ransom him.
Folks, these days it appears as if it’s several days of freedom for us, but one single happy day for the kidnappers.
