Modupe Oyetoso, a female commercial farmer, has alleged that some unknown gunmen of Fulani extraction kidnapped her on the way from her farm and killed her fiancé in the process.
Oyetoso is the Founder/CEO of smartfarm.com.ng, made the claim while speaking to Edmund Obilo, a popular Ibadan-based broadcast journalist, in an interview which was recently published on Facebook.
Narrating her ordeal, Oyetoso said the incident happened around 5pm on a Friday, but she did not mention the date.
According to her, she and her fiancé, who recently joined her in the farming enterprise and had planned to marry her in December, were done with the day’s work on the farm located in Lanlate, Oyo State, when they encountered the gunmen.
She claimed that the gunmen were Fulani people by the way they dressed, but spoke disjointed Yoruba language when they accosted her and her fiance.
She explained that she had issues with the Fulani people around her farm area and that the farmers in the area had just taken them to the police station and made them sign an agreement that their cattle would not stray on their farmland, that if they do, they would be sent away from the community.
Oyetoso said she, however, learnt that her abductors were not the cattle rearers but professional kidnappers.
She said: “We encountered these armed men on the road and tried to escape. But another batch was waiting for us at the front. They shot at the vehicle. I lost control and swerved to the bush path. The bullet hit the head of my fiancé.
“At that point, blood started gushing out of his head and I was momentarily confused trying to help stop the flow, but the blood did not stop. That was the point they caught up with us and dragged me out of the vehicle and began to lead me towards a bush path. I was just saying Jesus, Jesus. They took me to the bush and asked me to start running.
“By then, they had tied my hands. They were four in number. Three were in the front and side while one was at the back beating me each time I slowed down. We ran over a long distance and got to a river. We ran through the night. They were obviously used to the place. They pulled me through the river with my hands tied. The water of the river was up to my neck. I was terrified and wondering what would happen to me.”
Oyetoso explained that her phone and that of her fiancé were taken away from them by the gunmen, stating that they destroyed her fiancé phone and inserted the SIM card and inserted it into another phone to make calls.
She said all through the tortuous journey through the bush path she did not see the face of her abductors as the entire area was dark.
After their arrival at their chosen destination, the gunmen, according to her, gave her the phone to call her parents and tell them she had been kidnapped. The abductors spoke with her parents in their disjointed Yoruba language and asked them to bring N50 million before she could be released.
She said her father’s plea that he is a retiree and he did not have the required money fell on deaf ears as the kidnappers threatened to cause havoc.
Oyetoso said her family were forced to take her abductors seriously after they shot into the air with a gun she described as that of a hunter while on a call with her father.
She said she slept in the bush that night while her father and other family members began to look for the ransom money for the abductors. She said was offered food but she declined for fear of being poisoned, adding that one of her four abductors kept telling her she should see what had happened as her “destiny”.
She also said her abductors warned her father never to involve the police that they were going to kill her if he made such an attempt.
She stated that after the ransom was gotten, the abductors gave her father different directions where he would drop the money in a bid to confuse him and not make him know their exact location.
She said: “All this while I did not see their face. One of them stayed with me while three others trailed my dad to get the money. They gave him different directions to try to confuse him so he won’t be able to identify the place and asked him to drop the money at a spot.
“When they were certain the money had been dropped, they called the one staying with me to release me. I was released but was really scared. They led me to a spot and asked my father to put on the headlight of his car, so I could come and meet him. That was how I got to meet my dad, and we escaped from the place.”
Oyetoso got home she got to know her fiancé did not survive from the gunshot injury he sustained on his head.
“I can never forget that. It will be difficult for me to forget. I had to put the car up for sale because of the horrible experience.
“I was the one that made my fiancé fall in love with farming. He was a Lagos person. He had to leave all that to join me in the farming business in the bush. He just got involved few months before the incident,” she said.
She added: “In the course of the incident, I thought of escaping and even attempted to untie myself. But when they noticed they reacted violently. I was praying and asking the Lord to just make a way for me. I was resolute that I would come out of the experience alive.
“The Lord then made me realize that my life is more important than the money they wanted to collect. That was how I forgot about the idea of escaping because they could just kill me. In fact, they said to me that if they killed me, they would sell my body because there are those who buy human parts from them.”
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