Culled from NATION
A spiralling wave of ritual killings, mainly targeting girls and young women, has sent shockwaves across Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, amid a blame game between the government and other stakeholders, the nation of Kenya reports.
In villages and city estates alike, hundreds of families are in grief after lifeless bodies of their loved ones, whom they had reported as missing, were found dumped in rivers, thickets, trenches and roadsides.
All the corpses, according to police, had one common feature: missing parts that had either been gouged out or surgically cut off as if to fit a certain prescription.
Tongues, fingers, toes, ears and private parts, including breasts, are among popular parts targeted by the serial killers — said to be jobless young men who sell their ‘goods’ to witchdoctors and other lords of the spiritual underworld.
On March 7, the nation was enraged when a 22-year-old fashion designer was found killed in Lagos and some of her body parts chopped off.
The gruesome murder of Oluwabamise Ayanwola by the driver of a government-owned commercial bus service has left her family distraught.
Comfort Ayanwola, mother of the woman who went missing as she travelled on a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) on February 26, described her daughter as “an upright and responsible girl”.
Romantic relationship
Ayanwola told Nation.Africa that her last-born daughter, fondly referred to as Bamise, was not in any romantic relationship.
On the day she went missing, Bamise had boarded the bus, which she believed was heading to Oshodi, a local government area in Lagos State, at the Chevron bus stop.
But while on the bus, she had become suspicious of the behaviours of the driver and three other occupants of the vehicle.
Shaken, she started voice note chats with a friend, whom she alerted to her fears. But moments later, the chats petered out and her friend could no longer hear Bamise’s voice.
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NATION of Kenya
