Suleiman Abba Umar was abducted on January 6, 2014, in Kado, Abuja, after the close of school. His family searched for him in Nasarawa, Kano, Abuja, and Kaduna state to no avail.
Sharing his experience, Umar said after his abduction by unidentified persons, “I regained consciousness only to find myself on a pile of corpses by a beach, some with missing heads or limbs. I was terrified”. According to Daily Trust, the teenager said he had to work menial jobs, like bricklaying, to survive. He later started visiting a football viewing center where he met one Muhammed who took him in. According to him, one of the boys he met at Mohammed’s place advised him to search for his parents on Facebook. He said he found his mother’s Facebook page but there was no response to his friend request which led him to try adding their mutual friends and one of his cousins accepted. Suleiman, now 15, said when he told his cousin who he was, he thought he was a fraudster but later reluctantly sent him his mom’s number. Binta, his mother, said she was asleep when his call came in.“To my shock, I heard Suleiman stammering at the other end. As I heard his voice, I knew it was him, and I began to cry, and he joined in,” she said. Binta said although it was 1am in the morning, she could not wait to get to Lagos having lived with the pain of losing him for three years.“It was past 1:00am and I couldn’t wait to get to Lagos. I reached out to agents for flight tickets, to no avail, as virtually all the morning flights had been booked,” she said.“In the morning, I rushed to the airport has finally got a flight for noon. As I was doing this, I reached out to Katsina Liaison Office in Lagos to help, as well.“He’s totally changed, he’s now a man, and darker as a result of hardships he’s been through.”