Christopher Ladan, a Kaduna State-based patriarch, has been missing since December after a group of kidnappers who killed his wife swore never to rest until they found him.

A relative of the patriarch told FIJ that he disappeared after the kidnappers repeatedly visited his house at night in search of him while inflicting injuries on the Awon people.

The relative, who wishes to remain anonymous, said the kidnappers are also holding Ladan’s daughter in their custody, and she has been with them since they abducted her and her now-deceased mother on November 20.

According to the relative, the Awon people fear that Ladan’s daughter may have become a victim of rape since her abduction. She said the kidnappers stripped her of her clothes the moment they seized her.

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“It was her father they wanted to kidnap, but they didn’t meet him at home on the night they came for him. He was the security leader of the local vigilante group, which is why they targeted him,” the relative told FIJ.

The relative said the patriarch’s wife was killed in December after he failed to pay her ransom. She explained that those with financial means were able to secure the release of their abducted relatives, but Ladan could not.

“When the kidnappers got tired of waiting for my uncle, they took his wife to the village and told her to go home. As soon as she turned her back on them, she hadn’t taken 15 steps before they shot her and left her corpse there,” she said.

The villagers, the relative said, took the woman’s body to her husband’s house and kept it in her room because they couldn’t bury her immediately. However, that same night, the kidnappers returned and went straight to Ladan’s house.

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“They came for him. They probably thought he would be there, but they didn’t find him. Only elderly women were in the room with the corpse, so they left them alone,” she said.

The relative also said the kidnappers abducted two men and two women from their community on Sunday.

FIJ learnt that one of the women was the mother-in-law of a man who had just returned from the kidnappers’ den after spending three months in captivity.

In November, FIJ reported how the kidnappers left some Awon residents dead and injured, including a pregnant woman, and abducted several others, including Ladan’s wife and daughter, during a raid.

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The Kaduna patriarch had told FIJ in November that the kidnappers attacked his house because he was the community’s security coordinator.

“When they knocked on my door, my two wives opened it, thinking I was back. That was how the kidnappers abducted them and my 20-year-old daughter. They also killed my cousin in the attack,” he told FIJ in November.

“They attack us repeatedly. We report to the government and the soldiers, but they take no action. Now that it has become unbearable, we want to leave this village. We have been protecting ourselves because we don’t know what the government is doing. These guys come, attack and leave.”

Mansur Hassan, the Kaduna State Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO), told FIJ he would get back when quizzed if he knew of the happenings in Awon.