Amina continued, saying her husband, along with her, were probably drugged, as in a trance-like manner, they took their suitcase containing N 450,000 to the shrine. An unidentified man then gave the couple an object in a calabash. “We drank from the calabash and took an oath. He gave us a form to fill and paid N 10,000 for it. We were ordered to buy two cartons of wine.”

The couple did everything their abductors demanded of them but Amina said it was in a half-awake, half-asleep kind of state. “All I could remember was that they ask us to do something and we do exactly that,” she said.

The enslavement of sorts didn’t stop there, as Ezekwem, Amina’s husband was asked to go and bring more money. “Because the two of us could not leave at the same time, I offered to go and I went to Port Harcourt, sold a piece of land my mother left me and handed over almost a million naira to our captors,” he told Weekly Trust.

Leader of the Rivers State House of Assembly and uncle to Ezekwem, Hon. Chidi Lloyd called his nephew, who was then in captivity, to come to Port Harcourt and collect N250,000 as contribution to the impending burial. That also went into the pockets of the kidnappers.

It took the intervention of the Deputy Commissioner of Police in the state, Mr. Habila Josah, who happens to be from the same state with Amina, for her husband to be bailed, only to return to their abductors. “Strangely, we could not complain or reveal our situation to the police. They sent us to borrow money from people in the name of paying back with interest,” Amina, looking confused, said.

Ezekwem said the only thing he remembers is that the shrine is located between Etche and Imo State. He said they could not escape because they were unable to find their way out. He said: “There were several motorbike-riding people in the community but they would not carry us, except with the abductors’ leader’s order. When it is time for one of us to go to town in search of money, a red bike would take us to a junction. The instruction was that if one of us goes to Port Harcourt and do not return or reveals to the police what was happening, the other will be killed.”

With the threat, the couple could not tell anyone what was going on in their lives, even when Ezekwem was put in a police cell for days. “I was arrested, detained and treated like a criminal for 16 days at the Police HQ in Port Harcourt but I could not reveal what was happening to me out of fear of what could befall my wife.”

Ezekwem said he eventually had to “surrender” himself to the police station in Okehi when a man he borrowed N10,000 from held him at a junction as he was going out for another mission and attempted to drag him into a forest. The abductors’ leader’s brother, one Leonard Okerafor, now in custody, to bail Ezekwem out of fear that he could reveal what was happening. In police net, Okerafor sang. “I know my brother is a native doctor and he dupes people.” But Okerafor said he doesn’t know anything about the business. “They only called me to bail these people from the police station.”

Rivers State Commissioner of Police, Suleiman Abba, has declared war against kidnappers in the state, disclosing to Weekly Trust that dozens of them are already in police net. While the police says they are battle ready, the 2 Amphibious Brigade of the Nigerian Army in Port Harcourt equally said its men have since drawn the battle line with criminals, which is why they could rescue Amina and Ezekwem. Major Aminu Iliyasu, Army Public Relation Officer of the brigade said the Anti-Kidnapping Unit of the Joint Task Force has been working day and night to ensure that crime of this nature is reduced.