Kidnapped At Ife And Dumped Inside A Jungle In Kwara – OAU Student Shares Unbelievable Survival Story

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A female student of Obafemi Awolowo University has told a story of what happened after she was taken hostage and released inside a jungle. Saturday, July 23, 2016, was one day that will always give 18-year-old Praise Adelakin nightmares. That day, a journey from Ile-Ife, Osun State, to Ibadan, Oyo State, that was supposed to take her about two hours only, almost turned out to be a journey of no return. A 300 Level Law student of Obafemi Awolowo University, Praise had gone to the school in the morning of that day to check whether her things were still intact in her hostel before resumption after some weeks of strike by lecturers in the institution. Around 4pm, when she ensured she had put everything in place, she left for the Mayfair Motor Park in the town to board a bus going to Ibadan, where her family resides. All things being equal, she should have been back in Ibadan by around 6pm on the same day, but by 12 midnight of the following day, she found herself in Ilorin, Kwara State. Narrating the incident to our correspondent in Ibadan on Tuesday, she said, “We’ve been on strike for some weeks. Meanwhile, freshers had resumed three weeks before the strike, but due to the action, they were also sent back home. On July 23, I decided to go to school to check if my things were still intact and probably whether they had allocated my space (at Moremi Hall) to someone else. I got there and saw that my things had been scattered; my mattress had also been taken away with my buckets and other things, so I had to go round the rooms to gather them together. When I did that, I put them in my locker and locked them up. “When I finished all that, I decided to return home and that was around 4pm. I had arrived in school by 11am. So I went to the Mayfair Motor Park in Ife to get a bus back to Ibadan. It’s a popular motor park in the town because it’s a public one. When I got there, there were only two passengers in the bus and the driver was hanging around somewhere. All the same, I entered the bus to wait until we had enough passengers to take off. As of 7pm, we were only nine in the 18-seater white Mazda bus. It was getting dark, so everyone started complaining. We begged the driver to take off and told him that while on the way, it was possible he would get more passengers. He agreed and we took off.” Praise and other passengers were happy the driver heeded their pleas. Nothing in the driver’s appearance or the look of the bus suggested anything sinister. After all, they boarded the bus in a motor park, Praise thought. The journey proceeded normally until the driver swerved off the major road. He told them it was a short-cut to Ibadan. But the path turned out to be a ‘long-cut.’ She continued, “There is a university outside Ife town called Oduduwa University. A few minutes drive past it, our driver said he wanted to pass through a short-cut. He said because it was weekend, there was traffic in front. So he took us through the route. When we turned to pass through the so-called short-cut, we saw a bus in front of us and there was another bus behind us. It was a bushy path, but we were not so afraid because of the other two buses which were also taking the route. We thought it was a route which would take us to Ibadan faster. “As we were going through the path, we got to a junction where we saw that the bus which was in front of us was already parked. The passengers had disembarked. As we got there, we were also flagged down by a group of about five men; our driver stopped and he himself ordered us to get down. Everyone was shocked and we wondered what was happening, but nobody talked. We were all just looking. The bus behind us was also stopped and all of us passengers in the three buses were up to 40. They asked us to lie face down. At that point, I became afraid as I knew something was wrong. As I lay down, I quickly sent a message on my phone to my dad, reading, ‘Dad, I am held hostage and I don’t even know where we are. I think I am in danger. Please pray for me.’ I could use my phone to send the message because when they ordered us to lie down, the men went for a meeting at a nearby bush, together with our driver. My dad called me back after a few minutes, but I couldn’t pick it. The phone rang out. When they heard that my phone rang, they came back and collected my phone and others’. After collecting our phones, they went back to their meeting.

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