A 19-year-old admission seeker, Ewaoluwa Oluwatofunmi, escaped being kidnapped alongside 12 other passengers while travelling from Osogbo to Ilesa in Osun State.
The suspects were said to have boarded the bus to Ilesa, with the unsuspecting victims, from Osogbo at a park located in the Ilesa Garage Area of the Osun State capital.
In an interview with The PUNCH on Monday, Oluwatofunmi revealed how the suspects forced them into a nearby bush while pretending to take a pee approximately halfway through the trip around 1.30 p.m. on Sunday.
Ewaoluwa reported that three of the five male passengers on the back seat of the bus had informed the driver that they needed to ease themselves and that they wanted the vehicle to come to a stop.
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.
“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 in 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.”
