Harrowing escape after N11 million ransom turns murder in Edo forest

By Ozioruva Aliu

BENIN CITY—The bullet that killed 45-year-old Stella wasn’t meant for 66-year-old Mrs. Favour Nosakhare. But in the chaos of a dark forest, as kidnappers enforced their deadly act on families who couldn’t pay, the same round tore through both women.

Moments later, as a 15-year-old boy watched in silence, the old woman stopped breathing.

“I heard my mum’s voice. She was praying,” Annabel Emmanuel, said her voice still hollow days after the ordeal. “Then she started breathing heavily. Then… I didn’t hear her breath again.”

That was May 15, 2026. Six days after armed men dragged Annabel, her elderly mother, and her assistant from her mother’s home in Iyowa, Ovia North East Local Government Area, the nightmare had reached its bloody crescendo.

But the horror was not over. And the story of how Annabel survived, how anyone survived, is a chilling window into a new, more terrifying phase of kidnapping in Edo State.

Night trek into hell

It began quietly on the evening of May 9. Annabel, a businesswoman, was visiting her mother. At around 7 pm, the men came.  “They carried us straight from my mum’s house. I, my mum, and my assistant who helps me,” she recalled. “We trekked all night.”

For six days, they were marched through six different locations in the dense bush, moving only at night, resting by day like prey avoiding predators. First, it was just her family. Then other families arrived. Four girls from one house, then two more families. Soon, four separate families were huddled together, prisoners of a seven-man gang.

The demand started at N200 million. When families pleaded poverty, the torture began.  “They would torture us whenever our family said the money they had raised was small,” Annabel said.

Her family managed to scrape together N7.5 million. Another family had N1.5 million. A third had just N1 million. The kidnappers were furious.

Night of 

reckoning

On May 15, the gang separated the elders. They asked Mrs. Nosakhare her age. “66.” They asked another woman. “45.” Then they asked the 15-year-old boy nothing.

“I thought they were going to stop beating them because they were elders,” Annabel said. “But in the evening, they moved the three of them further away. We could still see them.”  The gang argued among themselves: Should they kill everyone? The families hadn’t met the demand. Then came the shots.

“They shot the other woman. The bullet went through her… to my mum.”

The 15-year-old boy was brought back. “He was told he was lucky that day, but that he would still die.” Minutes later, the surviving hostages were ordered to their feet. They marched again.

Shopping list

Even in death, Mrs. Nosakhare’s body was not immediately recovered. The kidnapping continued. After the three were killed, the gang raised their demands, not just for cash, but for a bizarre shopping list.

Annabel’s family was ordered to pay a total of N11 million, plus two big school bags,14 plates of rice and turkey,  “Ice” (methamphetamine) three grams, five crates of Fanta,  two crates of Black Bullet drink, N30,000 worth of suya (spiced grilled meat)  and seven power banks.

Other families supplied the items. Only then were all surviving hostages released.  “They released all of us at the same time,” Annabel said quietly.

If you see the gun, 

you cannot leave,-

says Musa, a suspect

Police have since arrested one suspect: 24-year-old Haruna Musa, a Fulani herder who claims he was lured into the gang at gunpoint.

His confession reads like a tragedy of coercion. Musa said he was hired in Ogun State to tend cows that belonged to a farmer, not a Fulani. After the farmer sold the cattle, a fellow Fulani he called “brother” invited him to “accompany him to work” in Benin.

“When we got to the pipeline, he brought out the gun,” Musa told police. “I asked what it was. He said, ‘This is the work.’ He said since I saw the gun, if I did not go with them, they would kill me. Because if they let me go, they would think I was going to bring people after them.”

Musa named his gang members only by aliases: Doctor, Smally, Akhere, Yellow, and Blakky. He led police to the forest where the bodies of Mrs. Nosakhare and the other woman were found decomposing on June 2. The 15-year-old boy’s body had already been recovered.

We‘ll Not Rest

— Police  

Edo State Police Public Relations Officer, ASP Eno Ikoedem, confirmed that the Violent Crime Response Unit (VCRU) engaged the gang in a gun duel on May 19. Four suspects escaped with bullet wounds. Days later, Musa was arrested while seeking treatment for his own gunshot injury.

“He has confessed to being part of a kidnapping syndicate terrorizing the Benin–Lagos and Benin–Akure roads,” Ikoedem said. “We are on the trail of the rest. The Commissioner of Police, CP Monday Agbonika, has vowed that no stone will be left unturned.”

The Commissioner also appealed to the public for timely, credible information.

Collaborators

Annabel’s story comes amid mounting allegations that the kidnappers have local collaborators. Just weeks before her abduction, an indigene of Ubiaja in Esan South-West LGA was arrested for allegedly using his own house as a kidnapping base, where ransoms were negotiated and operations planned. His house has since been demolished.

But for Annabel, justice will not bring back her mother. Nor will it silence the memory of that night in the bush.  “They didn’t ask them anything else,” she said. “They just shot them.” 

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