Residents of Kaduna community cry out over kidnapping
Sabon Gayan, a thriving community located along the Kaduna-Abuja expressway, is gradually becoming a den of kidnappers. Subsequently, residents of the community have cried out for help.
Located at Kilometre 16, along the Kaduna-Abuja highway, Sabon Gayan is also home to the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) orientation camp in Kaduna State. The community is popularly called “Black Gold.”
However, residents of the community are extremely worried over the activities of kidnappers, and have cried out.
The residents, who are mainly agrarian, are worried that they can no longer go to their farms due to insecurity. Daily Trust on Sunday leant that majority of the people have abandoned their farms for fear of being attacked, and the community is gradually becoming deserted.
In the last one year, there have been a series of attacks and killings along the area. In fact, recently, residents of the community blocked the Kaduna-Abuja expressway for several hours to protest the killing of the leader of the civilian Joint Task Force (JTF) in the area, Commander Haruna Halilu. He was killed while harvesting maize on his farm at Ungwar Katsinawa.
It was gathered that Halilu, also known as Maikaji, was killed following a meeting he convened to mobilise his members to assist security agents in confronting kidnappers in the villages.
A resident of the community, Mukhtar Khalil, said it was the fourth time such incidenct occurred in the community. The demise of Halilu had raised a lot of dust because he was the leader of the civilian JTF, the All Progressives Congress (APC) youth leader in Kakau ward, as well as leader of traditional hunters.
“He led three groups and was very dedicated to protecting the people and the community. That was why his death was very painful,” Khalil said.
Apart from Halilu, many people have been killed in the area. For example, a man was killed at Unguwar Fulani, another at Ungwar Katsinawa and one at Ungwar Yanma.
It was gathered that the killers always traced their victims to their houses. The man at Ungwar Yanma was killed, and his wife, who was a nursing mother, was kidnapped. A ransom of N150, 000 was paid before she was released.
A trader, Mohammed Idirs, said he had lived in the community for over 15 years, but noted that due to the spate of insecurity, he and his family no longer spend the night there. According to him, on a daily basis, they would travel to a safer community to spend the night and come back in the morning.
He said the worrisome level of insecurity in the community began about two years ago, adding that the weekly Sabon Gayan market no longer attracts the kind of crowd it used to have in the past.
A woman, who simply gave her name as Mama, said she could no longer go to her farm for fear of being attacked. “We don’t sleep properly at night because we are not safe, even at home. I have a farm at Sabon Gayan, but I cannot harvest my produce because it has been taken over by cattle, and if I dare go there, anything can happen,” she said.
She called on security agents to comb all the bushes and farms within and around the community, with a view to fishing out the bandits.
“Although the police are on the road, killings are going on in the bushes. A man was killed close to my farm and the body decomposed because people were afraid to go there,” she said.
In an interview, the commissioner of police, Kaduna State command, Agyole Abeh, said that confessions from some of the arrested suspects had shown that youths and indigenes of the area provide information to the bandits who attack members of the community.
He said, “It is the same people who take families of victims on their motorbikes to pay ransom in the forest.” He, however, said that investigation into the activities of the bandits had commenced and assured that his men would not relent in their efforts to get them arrested and prosecuted accordingly.
The commissioner said the police had arrested eight people, including a cripple, over their alleged involvement in the killing of the civilian JTF leader. Exhibits recovered from the suspects include an AK-47 rifle, three locally made guns, one live cartridge and two cars.
Parading the suspects in Kaduna, the Force public relations officer, CSP Jimoh Moshood, had said they confessed to the crime.
Similarly, sometime ago, the InspectorGeneral of Police, Ibrahim Idris, in a message at Sabon Gaya, appealed to residents to avail the police with the relevant information about the criminals, assuring that they would act swiftly. Idris, who was represented by Assistant Inspector-General of Police in charge of Zone 7, comprising Kaduna, Niger and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Salisu Abdullahi Fagge, also promised to bring the perpetrators of the dastardly act to justice. He assured residents of the community that the police had the capacity to provide security, stressing that nobody is allowed to take laws into his hands.
He disclosed that to bring an end to kidnapping and other crimes in the area, helicopters would be deployed to provide aerial surveillance along the Kaduna-Abuja highway.