Bandits tied me up without food for 48 hours – Niger commissioner

NIGER State Information Commissioner  Mohammed Idris Sani rejoined his friends and colleagues  late Thursday with a tale of woes  from the  den of kidnappers   who had seized him on Monday night.

He is proud of the government for not yielding to threat from his abductors for ransom.

He is the latest and most prominent kidnap victim in the state since gunmen turned the hitherto peaceful state into a terror zone.

Speaking with newsmen yesterday  after he was received  by the Speaker of the State House of Assembly, Alhaji Abdullahi Bawa Wuse and some members of the Executive Council, Idris said he was made to sleep in the rain for two days before his abductors decided to give him their own  trampoline to shield  him from the weather.

The commissioner called his abduction as dehumanizing, degrading and humiliating saying that he was pushed to a limit he does not wish for anybody.

“I went through a lot of trials in their hands, a lot of dehumanizing things. It is not an experience that I will pray for my greatest enemy. It was dehumanizing, humiliating and degrading,” he said.

Recalling how it all started,Sani said:”They picked me from my house after breaking all the doors. They took me to a no man’s land in the middle of nowhere. I was there exposed to the rains for 48 hours with neither food nor water given to me, with my hands and legs tied.

“Instead of them breaking me, I started breaking them. They started giving me bread and water, they untied me and they began to show concern. They gave me the trampoline they used to cover themselves when they sleep and allowed me to use it to cover myself in the rains.”