By SONI DANIEL, Abuja

Tension is rising in Madallah, the suburb of Niger State over the alleged abduction of a Christian school girl, whose name is given as Victory by a chief in the community.

The man simply identified as Muhammed, about 70 years old, reportedly took custody of Victory, a student of Government Secondary School, Zuba near Abuja on a Sunday and connived with some others and changed her name from Victory to the Hausa name of Hadiza without the knowledge and consent of her parents.

According to the victim’s father, Victory was also assigned a new husband while in the custody of her captors in the three weeks that they seized and kept her in their hideout.

Victory’s father, Paul, narrated to Arewa Voice how her daughter inexplicably disappeared from home that fateful Sunday and how all efforts by the family to locate her failed.

The hapless father, who is grieving over the fate of her daughter, said the man had seized and hid the girl in his custody for three weeks until a water vendor popularly known in Hausa as ‘Mairuwa’ alerted him of the abduction of her daughter by the man.

“My family is distraught to see how a 70-year-old man can abduct my daughter and without any shame, keep her in his house for more than three weeks until some people brought the information to us.

“As we speak, the personal effects of my daughter are still in the man’s house even though the girl has been rescued and taken away by NAPTIP, which fought hard with the aid of others to retrieve her form the man’s house.

“When we discovered that the man had taken the girl and we approached him, the man was very boastful that my daughter voluntarily ‘converted to Islam’ and that he was taking her to Suleja if we insisted on taking her back and we were all shocked.

“The suspect even demanded that we the parents must sign an agreement with him before he could release my daughter to me. We reported the matter to the police but they said they could not do anything about it and then some persons reached out to NAPTIP that eventually stepped in.

“As we speak, our daughter is in the custody of NAPTIP but we want her back urgently.

Responding to Arewa Voice enquiry on the matter, the Director General of NAPTIP, Dame Julie Okah-Donli, confirmed the incident and the arrest of the suspects involved.

The DG disclosed that while the suspects had been charged to court for trafficking, the victim, Victory was still being attended to in one of NAPTIP’s centres.

“We are on top of that case and we want to ensure that all those implicated in the matter face the full weight of the law,” the DG declared.(Text, excluding headline, courtesy Vanguard)

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