By Ade Oyeyemi
The Imo State Police Command has located the suspected hideout of gunmen who abducted 19 prospective National Youth Service Corps members in the state, but security operatives have delayed a raid over intelligence that the camp may be booby-trapped with improvised explosive devices.
The Commissioner of Police, Audu Garba Bosso, disclosed this on Saturday while providing an update on the search-and-rescue operation.
According to Bosso, security operatives tracked the abductors into the bush before deploying drones to identify their location.
He, however, said the planned operation was put on hold after intelligence indicated that explosives might have been planted around the suspected camp.
“Any moment, we’ll still move into the bush. Yesterday, we were in the bush, we trailed them up to a particular location.
“But at that point in time, we couldn’t move in to where the coordinate showed us where they are because we ran drones yesterday. And the drone actually showed us exactly their location.
“But our predicament is that with the intel we have, the IED is—the camp is mined with IEDs,” the commissioner said.
Bosso said security agencies were preparing to deploy heavy equipment, including bulldozers and armoured personnel carriers, to enable them to access the location while minimising the risk to the victims and rescuers.
“We are moving in there with high, you know, high-velocity vehicles, that is, bulldozers, we’re moving in with bulldozers and APCs to see how we’re going to rescue these victims unhurt,” he added.
The abduction occurred on Thursday along the Owerri-Onitsha Road in the Umunoha area of Imo State, where gunmen reportedly attacked two buses conveying prospective corps members from Ibadan, Oyo State, to their orientation camps in Abia and Akwa Ibom states.
The Managing Director of Uko Akwa Ibom Motors Nigeria Limited, Isiah Akpan, told Saturday PUNCH that 19 passengers, all prospective corps members, were taken into the bush during the attack.
He said the drivers escaped and alerted security personnel at a nearby checkpoint, prompting the commencement of a search operation.
The abductors have reportedly demanded N50m for each victim, putting the total ransom at N950m. Some of the families were said to have been contacted through the mobile phones of their abducted relatives.
A mother of one of the victims, Mrs Oladosu, also told Saturday PUNCH that the kidnappers contacted her family through her daughter’s phone and that some of the victims were seen during a video call.
Meanwhile, the police had earlier announced the rescue of 10 people in connection with the incident. However, the command’s spokesperson, Henry Okoye, said he could not immediately confirm whether those rescued were among the abducted prospective corps members.
The latest development suggests that security agencies have made progress in locating the remaining victims, as efforts continue to secure their safe release.
