Ewaoluwa Oluwatofunmi, a 19-year-old admission seeker living in Ilesa, Osun State has narrated how she and 12 other passengers traveling from Osogbo to Ilesa escaped being abducted.
During an interview with Punch on Monday, Ewaoluwa explained how she boarded a bus going to Ilesa from Osogbo at a park in Ilesa Garage Area of Osun State capital around 1.30 pm on Sunday.
She said, “Around 1:30 pm on Sunday, I went to Ilesha Garage in Osogbo to enter a bus going to Ilesha. When I got to the park, I met 5 men and some ladies inside the bus. We moved after the bus was filled, but on getting to a bushy area in between Osogbo and Ilesa, three of the men sitting at the back seat told the driver to park for them to urinate.
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“The driver obliged them and when they got down, they asked others inside the bus to also come down and urinate. But we told them we are mature enough to know if we wanted to urinate. Later, one of them lied to the driver that one of the bus tyres was deflected. The driver got down and the other people on the bus also went down.
“Few minutes before that would happen, I was on the phone with my father speaking and I didn’t end the call as I came down from the bus. As soon as we came down from the bus, the men brought out guns and asked us to move into the bush.
We trekked for some minutes inside the bush until the men stopped us and asked us to bring out whatever valuables we had on us.
“I submitted my big phone to the kidnappers but I kept the small phone I was using to speak with my parents in my pocket without ending the call, so they could hear we were in danger. We were doing that when suddenly, we heard the siren of the police and that scared the abductors who were heavily armed and spoke in pidgin English. They ran away and left us there.”
When contacted, the spokesman of state police Command, Yemisi Opalola, in a text message confirmed the incident.
The message read, “Combined efforts of the police and hunters rescued the victims.”
