It was a bright morning on Friday February 1, 2013 when 42-year-old Omolara Abioye left her Ikorodu home in Lagos to honour an appointment with her father in another area of Ikorodu. But she allegedly ended up in the dark den of kidnappers for 10 days.
She said: “I had left my residence in Ebuwawa, Agbede, Ikorodu, to see my father who lives in Labori, off Ikorodu-Sagamu Road, when I was abducted by four men. I had actually boarded a commercial motorcycle and at a point, the motorbike had a flat tyre around Transformer area of Ikorodu. It was while I was looking for another motorbike that a red Mazda car with four male occupants pulled up and I was forcibly abducted.”
The woman, who said she was kidnapped in broad daylight, stated that she was kept in a dingy room while her 10-day ordeal lasted.
She said: “I was dragged into a small room with a small matress while my abductors seized my telephone from me.
“On the third day of my abduction, two of my abductors tried to rape me and we struggled for nearly 30 minutes during which they tore my under pant. In the process of struggling with them, I sustained wound on my right thumb. I had to tell them that I was pregnant and that it was a taboo for a man to rape a pregnant woman because doing so comes with a generational curse. On hearing that, they changed their mind and left me alone.”
Her parents had by then become more than worried, particularly because she had called her father on the phone when she set out on the botched journey.
“My father was more than worried because I had called him that I was already on my way to his residence before the unfortunate incident,” she said.
Not a few would wonder how she survived the horrible abduction and solitary confinement.
Hear her: “The next day, they brought food for me to eat but I rejected the meal and instead requested for water. They handed me my GSM phone and asked me to call my husband for the negotiation of ransom and that was when it dawned on me that it was a clear case of set up.”
While she was hoping that reaching out to her husband on the telephone would bring a reprieve, it was a fruitless exercise as her husband, according to her, could not be reached on the phone for days.
“For five days, they tried to reach my husband on the telephone to negotiate ransom but disappointedly, he was not picking his calls. By the time he picked his call on the sixth day, his responses were not encouraging at all.
“It was at that point that my abductors told him that he was the one they were looking for and that they had decided to come for me in order to teach him a lesson. Unknown to my abductors, each time they wanted to call my husband on the phone, they would first hand over the phone to me to unlock and I would have smartly programmed its recording. I have all the audio conversations with my husband with me.”
She recalled how freedom came her way following a text message sent by her mother to her phone asking the abductors to consider her old age.
“When my husband would not respond, my mother started sending text messages to my abductors, pleading that my life be spared because she had been laid back by partial stroke for sometime now and that her condition had since worsened since she received the news of my abduction. The message touched them and they told me in plain terms that they would have killed me but for the emotional text message from my mother. Hence, I was released on Sunday February 10,2013.
“ I was shocked that my own husband could have a hand in my abduction because the men who kidnapped me told my husband in clear terms that he was trying to avoid them after they had carried out the ‘job’ he gave them.
“He did not report my disappearance to the police despite my parents’ insistence that he should do so. And when my parents visited a church where he said he was observing spiritual seclusion, he ordered some male members of the church to chase them away.”
In a purported audio recording made available to our correspondent, Omolara’s abductors were heard in a conversation with her husband saying, “…You are the one who has wronged us but we are going to release your wife…”
But Omolara’s estranged lover, Mr. Segun Abioye, in a telephone conversation with our correspondent, described her story as a contrived tale.
He said: “Thank God she has been found. But let me first of all say that she is not my wife but an ex-lover. We were not married at all and I don’t know what she wants from me again. I dated her about eight months ago and when I discovered that she lied that she was pregnant, I quit the relationship.
“I met her last year while riding in a commercial tricycle popularly called Keke Marwa and we exchanged phone numbers. She was then homeless. I got her a new accommodation in July and I was hoping to derive something from the relationship because my other marriage had been fruitless. She took advantage of that to extort money from me by lying that she was pregnant, not knowing that it was all lies. But for the intervention of my doctor, I would not have known that she was cooking pregnancy tales to deceive me and extort money from me.
“A few days before she came up with the kidnap story, she came to the church where I was observing spiritual seclusion to make a scene.
“I don’t believe that kidnappers could be so careless as to have allowed her to record their conversations with me. That is why I said that I don’t believe her kidnap story. She is out of my life for real and I would ask her parents to caution her because she has wrongly been accusing me of being the brains behind her kidnap ordeal.”
