12-year-old girl escapes from kidnappers in Yaounde, recounts ordeal

A young IDP girl in Yaounde has been left traumatised after she wittily escaped for the hands a group of kidnappers who had her for one day.
The girl who lives in Mendong with her aunt was kidnapped by the store man who apparently works as an agent to the bigger cartel.

The girl’s aunt with whom she lives recounts the ordeal of the little girl: “I sent the little girl to the market in Mendong to go buy me some medication from one of the small medicine stores at the market. As she went, she never came back again. On that same day I started searching for the little girl to no avail,” she narrated.

The aunt equally revealed that she dropped a complaint at the Gendarmerie Brigade in Mendong but they did very little to help find the missing girl. The girl returned the following day, Monday evening, by 3:00 p.m. as revealed by her aunt looking all shabby.

“I asked her what happened and she said when she went to the store to get the drugs, the storeman removed a gun and pointed it at her head then ordered her to climb on a bike which he himself rode. The storeman took the girl to a place called ‘Careffou Beignets’ in an uncompleted building where she equally met other kids, 4 of them. While she was there, they asked her to give them my number but she refused and as a result was thoroughly beaten by the kidnappers,” she expatiated.

“The girl also told me that at night, when they were asleep, she and one other kid realised the kidnappers had slept off, so they used the opportunity to escape through the window. She told me that two other kids refused to follow them in the escape saying their parents had already been called and they would the next day bring a ransom of FCFA 150,000 then take them home. She started asking for descriptions to find her way back home till she got to the house. So I took her still in her dirty clothes to the Gendarmerie in Mendong where I had reported her disappearance and told them about the kidnap emphasising that one of their agents was right there at the Mendong Market,” she told us.

“I was shocked when the Gendarmes asked me to go to the market and wait for the kidnappers and only call when they came. I insisted telling them that three other kids were still being held captive by the kidnappers and they needed to do something as soon as possible. That was when they went to the market and arrested the medicine storeman, then asked me to go home that they would interrogate him later,” she concluded.

The kidnapping business had obviously been going on for a while now in the area as there have been numerous cases of kidnap still from the same quarter. The extent to which these criminals can go remains a mystery.

Mimi Mefo Info