The horrific murder of one of six kidnapped sisters close to Nigeria’s capital has gripped and shocked a nation that has become nearly immune to the kidnapping epidemic.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
In Nigeria, stories of kidnappings for ransom fill the news on a daily basis. Kidnappings by armed gangs are so frequent that many families don’t even report them to police for fear of reprisals and a lack of faith that it will help. But the kidnapping of six sisters and the subsequent murder of one of them has seized the headlines in Nigeria. NPR’s Emmanuel Akinwotu is in Lagos. Hi there.
EMMANUEL AKINWOTU, BYLINE: Hi, Juana.
SUMMERS: Emmanuel, if you can, tell us a little bit more about this case.
AKINWOTU: Well, there are so many bleak details. You know, a family, including a father and his six daughters, they were kidnapped on January 2. The abductors then demanded a ransom of about 10,000 U.S. dollars – just a huge amount for an ordinary family. And actually, the family thought they’d done what was asked. They thought they’d raise the funds and were hoping to rescue their children. Actually, what they found out is one of their daughters, Nabeeha, who is a university student, was shot dead and left at the side of the road. The kidnappers then raised the ransom fee by several times that amount and have clearly exploited, basically, the high-profile nature of this case.
It’s really ignited anger across Nigeria because there’s been essentially an epidemic of kidnapping over the last three, four years that many people have just grown desensitized to. You know, thousands of people have been kidnapped. In the year to last June, 3,600 people were abducted, according to one group. And most of these people are in rural parts of the country, poor parts of Nigeria where policing has more or less completely collapsed. I’ve been speaking to Confidence Isaiah-MacHarry. He is a security analyst at a firm called SBM. He told me that in…
Read the full article here