A 21-year-old lady, Chineme (surname withheld), has narrated her experience in the hands of warlords from a neighbouring clan in Ebonyi State, who attempted to kill her for ritual purposes.

According to her, she was abducted last Sunday and taken to a thick forest where she was supposed to be killed for sacrifice by the suspected warlords.

Chineme, a native of Ndiegu Amagu, Ikwo local government area of Ebonyi State spoke on Friday. According to her, she was on her way to the International Market, in Abakaliki, when she got abducted to a thick forest and stripped naked by 15 men, who subsequently hung her on a tree.

She said: “I entered a motorcycle at Spera-in-Deo to International Market, Abakaliki, when I alighted from a bus that carried me from Ikwo to Abakaliki. But on getting to the International Market, the okada man diverted me to a bush.

“Before he diverted me to the bush, he started telling me what Izzi people are doing to Ikwo people and said only God will judge them. He told me that he was praying to God to give Ikwo people the heart to retaliate against what the Izzi people are doing to them and I did not utter anything.

“He told me not to speak Ikwo dialect so that I would not be killed by Izzi people and I told him ‘okay’ not knowing that he was an Izzi man. Before I could notice it, he passed the International Market and took me into the bush. I started crying and told him that he was taken me to where I did not tell him to take me to and he told me to keep quiet.

“When we got to the bush, 15 persons were already waiting for us and they immediately pulled off all my clothes and set them on fire. They put a rope on my neck and hung me on a tree.

“After they hung me on the tree, they told me that they wanted to kill me and use me as a sacrifice on Sunday. There was a native doctor in that bush and immediately he saw me, he shouted, ‘Yes, we have seen the person I will use for sacrifice.’ He brought out a tortoise and placed it on my neck. By my left and right-hand sides on the tree were two decomposing male corpses.

“My assaulters took the N35,000 I had on me and after two hours, one of them came from somewhere and told me that these two persons hanging on the tree with you decomposing, died under five minutes and I am still alive. He told me that for staying two hours without dying, he would save me and I thanked him.

“He used a cutlass to cut off the rope around my neck and brought me down. He told me to follow a particular road and go home, but he warned me against following the road the okada man took while he brought me into the forest to avoid getting killed. I saw many human parts including skulls in that thick forest. The man released me at 3 pm and I got home at 9 pm.”

Chineme’s fiance, Evangelist Chinedu Emmanuel, decried the incident and called on the state government to ensure that the perpetrators were brought to book. He said, “I am very sad about the incident. Government and security agents should do everything humanly possible to put an end to all these things.”

The Chairman of Ikwo local government, Steve Orogwu, who confirmed the incident, described it as wickedness. He said, “I am calling on security agencies to please come to the aid of our people. The Ikwos are an endangered set of people. All these things happening are against the Ikwo people.

“A vehicle will come out either in the night and will be shouting Ikwo! Ikwo!! Midway into the trip, the passengers will get diverted into the bush where they would get killed and nothing will be heard of them again.

“The police from the headquarters, Abakaliki had raided this particular forest in question and caught some people who even made confessional statements about how they had killed as much as 48 persons in that forest but they are still active in the forest,” he said.

Ikwo is one of the three major clans in the Abakaliki political block of the state known as Umuekumenyi. The other two are Izzi and Ezza. The three clans had hitherto lived in peace as they were believed to share the same ancestry.

They hold inter-tribal marriages and carry out business activities together. Whenever disagreements arose between any two of the tribes, it was settled through dialogue before it gets out of hand.

But the land dispute between the people of Enyibichiri Echi-Alike Ikwo, in Ikwo local government area of the state and their neighbours in Enyigba, Abakaliki local government area also in the state have persisted.

The Enyibichiri are from the Ikwo clan while the Enyingba are from the Izzi clan. They have been at war for decades with many lives and properties worth billions of naira destroyed.

In the past few months, the crisis escalated with killings, abductions, and destruction of properties.

Governor David Umahi subsequently intensified efforts to end the killings while security agents have arrested some of the warlords. But despite these efforts, secret killings and abductions persist between warring parties.

Chineme’s ordeal was the latest of several secret abductions and killings. Chineme, who would be getting married on September 25, this year, said she would have been killed by her abductors but for divine intervention.