From John Adams, Minna
A kidnapped victim from Zagzaga community in Munya Local Government Area of Niger State, Haliru Musa, who escaped from the bandits’ den, has revealed how an entire village was seized by and converted to a camp where victims are kept.
Haliru, 35, was among the 55 victims kidnapped from Zagzaga about a month ago when the bandits invaded the community.
Only last week, the bandits rejected N5 million offered by the community for the release of their victims, insisting that each of the victims must pay N1 million before they regain their freedom.
So far, eight people have managed to escape from their abductors and Haliru was among the lucky ones, but not without a bitter experience.
After three weeks in captivity, Harliru and his friend, Saidu, managed to escape from the bandits’ after crawling on their elbows, knees and belly in the bush in the night for over one hour.
Haliru said, from 8pm, he and his friend trekked in the bush the whole night till 6pm the following day without water or food until they escaped to safety.
Haliru, who narrated his three-week ordeal in the hands of his abductors to Daily Sun in an exclusive interview, painted a detailed picture of the camp where they were kept. He said they were held in a small village made up of predominantly farmers who spoke Gbagyi and Hausa languages.
The village, he said, was about 50 kilometres from Kusasu community in Shiroro LGA of Niger State, on the border with Kaduna State.
Speaking in Hausa, Haliru said: “They kept us in a village, not in the bush. There were people living there because there were houses there. The people were farmers and they spoke Gbagyi and Hausa.”
According to him, the bandits seized some rooms from the people in the community, where victims were kept: “They shared us into the rooms. Between five and six persons slept in a room and we were not allowed to see outside except when we wanted to pray or ease ourselves.
“When food was ready, they would ask the women who usually cooked for us to bring the food to us in the room. We drank the same stream water that the village people drank.”
He said the women among them were separated and taken to another place where the bandits commanders stayed within the village. He said he could not say what happened to the women there.
Haliru disclosed that the bandits sometimes took them to the community’s farms to harvest their produce, mostly yam tubers, with which they were fed, adding that the community dared not challenge the gunmen.
“The only food we ate was yam, and they usually took us to the people’s farms to harvest the yam and they would ask the women in the community to cook it for us. We ate once a day,” he explained.
For the three weeks he spent in captivity, he and his co-abductees were not allowed to bathe. The only time that water touched their body was during ablution before prayers.
He told Daily Sun that, apart from the 55 of them that were abducted from Zagzaga community, there were other victims kidnapped from other neighbouring communities, stressing that they were over 100 in the camp before his miraculous escaped.
Although Haliru said he could not count the number of their abductors, they could not be fewer than 70, all fully armed with sophisticated weapons, addin: “They usually shared themselves inside bush around the village and always warned us not to try to escape, as anybody who tried it would be shot dead.
“Even the village people were not allowed to go out of the community but they were not locked inside like us. They were confined within the village. They did not even allow them to go to farm.”
On how he managed to escape with his friend, Haliru said: “We told them that we wanted to go and ease ourselves; we took rubber kettles and went behind the house. In the process, they brought food for us and that distracted them a little, and when we discovered that their attention was not with us, I told my friend that we should enter the bush.
“We started crawling on our knees and even belly until we were able go some distance from the village before we started walking in the bush. We trekked for the whole night till the next day before we got to Kusasu, where we saw people, and they helped us with food and transport money to reach our destination in Zagzaga,” he said.