Mother and Son
Facebook has reunited a mother and
her son who was abducted three years ago.
Suleiman Abba Umar was abducted on
January 6, 2014, in Kado, Abuja after the close of school.
The Report had that his family searched
for him — in Nasarawa, Kano, Abuja and Kaduna states — to no avail.
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”.
The teenager said he had to work
menial jobs, like bricklaying, to survive.
He later started visiting a football
viewing centre 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.
“I visited food vendors, pushed
disabled people on wheelchairs for a commission of their takings for the day,
sometimes as low as N100 daily.
“I met one Muhammed, and we became
friends, so I soon moved to their shanty. I was always quiet, so almost
everyone around me thought I had a speech impairment.
“I told them my parents’ names, and
they came up with all kinds of ideas, and someone suggested I search for my
family on Facebook.
“There was no response for a while,
so we also tried using mutual friends. One of my cousins accepted, and we got
chatting, and when I told him who I was, he laughed and thought I was an
internet fraudster out to exploit the family’s pain.
“My cousin reluctantly sent me my
mum’s number, and that’s when I placed the call that night, and we spoke.”
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 having 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.”
