Approximately 45 passengers in three fully loaded 15-seater commercial buses have reportedly been abducted by armed men in Orokam along the Otukpo-Enugu Road in Ogbadigbo Local Government Area (LGA) of Benue State.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The incident occurred at about 3:30 pm on Thursday when heavily armed men ambushed the commercial vehicles, forcing the drivers at gunpoint to pull over. An eyewitness and driver of one of the transportation companies revealed that the armed men emerged from nearby forests, and their initial demand for ransom was \u20a615 million for each passenger, later negotiated and settled at \u20a63 million per passenger.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The eyewitness narrated, “Their target was obviously commercial buses, maybe because of the number of passengers that could harvest ransom for them. In this particular instance, they took passengers in three-loaded buses that were heading toward Otukpo. My saving grace was that a J-5 articulated vehicle was in my front. So when we were all stopped, before they got to my vehicle, I jumped out and ran into the bush, and all my passengers also followed. Luckily, none of my passengers were caught by the armed men.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The armed men reportedly opened negotiations with family members for the ransom. However, during the resolution process, the phone line went off, and contact with the kidnappers has been lost.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Security forces, including soldiers, were said to be on the lookout for the armed men and the kidnapped victims in the area. The incident happened between a police and army checkpoint in Orokam, after the Trailer Park at a bad portion of the road.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Approximately 45 passengers in three fully loaded 15-seater commercial buses have reportedly been abducted by armed men in Orokam along the Otukpo-Enugu Road in Ogbadigbo Local Government Area (LGA) of Benue State. The incident occurred at about 3:30 pm on Thursday when heavily armed men ambushed the commercial vehicles, forcing the drivers at gunpoint […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":14584,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[172],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14582"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14582\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14585,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14582\/revisions\/14585"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}