For the rest of the day, negotiations continued between the kidnappers on one side and the respective families of the hostages on the other.
In the meantime, we had some avenues to steal some more conversations amongst ourselves, one of which was concerning food.
Is there no food in the kidnappers den?
I asked one of the guys whom we were told were kidnapped before us, “Have these people (referring to the kidnappers) given you anything to eat since they held you?”
“No,” he replied to me. “We have not eaten since they kidnapped us.”
From what I gathered from the kidnappers, this guy with the other two men was kidnapped on Saturday. That was two days before we were kidnapped on Monday afternoon.
The kidnappers didn’t want us to talk to one another. So we too kept our cool and calm. But our peace would soon be disrupted as they began inviting each of us in turns to a corner for profiling with a view to extracting additional vital information from us. What followed next would turn out to be a gruesome experience.
The gruelling profiling
I knew it would be a matter of only a few minutes before it got to my turn to be profiled through a series of questions intentionally constructed to elicit the answers that would help their criminal cause.
“Hey, oya, you from the ash colour Toyota car,” their leader shouted, as he pin-pointed me by stamping his feet on my back while I lay on the forest ground, “Come here.”
Interestingly, he didn’t forget the colours of the two cars they ambushed on the highway. Both were Toyotas but he was able to differentiate them by their colours and model.
He didn’t know my name by then but he made sure he didn’t confuse me with the hostage taken from the other Toyota car. I would later realise that the kind of car one drove was part of the initial visible external means of profiling a target.
I made effort to stand up to face him. But before getting up on my feet, one of the other gunmen dashed to where I was and dragged me aside into a small human circular triangle formed by three of the other gunmen.
“Kneel down and face here,” their main guy commanded me, with two other men pointing their long guns at me – each at my left and right, towards my back.
Victors Corner Blog 