Man remanded for abducting two boys, infecting one with HIV

A resident of the Adamawa State capital, Yola, Adamu Abdurahman, has been remanded in prison custody for allegedly abducting and having canal knowledge two teenage boys.

The boys are aged 16 and 17 years.

While the 16-year-old is missing, with the abductor claiming he returned him to Mubi, a town in the northern fringe of the state from where both boys travelled to Yola last month, the 17-year-old who is now with a guardian has been diagnosed with HIV.

A Yola magistrate court handling the case refused a bail application filed for the accused when ruling on the application was delivered on Thursday.

The counsel to the accused, Friday Charles, had pleaded in his application for bail that the offence is bail able and that the accused is a Yola resident who had undertaken to be always present each time he is needed by either the court or the police.

Countering this plea, the police prosecutor, ASP Abdullahi Abubakar, had urged the court to reject the application for bail, contending that if the accused was granted bail at this stage of the case, he could jeopardize police investigation into it.

The magistrate presiding over the case at the Magistrate Court, Yola Town, Hon Jummai Ibrahim, ruled that the offence with which the accused was charged is not bailable as it is capital in nature, and therefore ordered that the accused be returned to prison custody, and adjourned further mention of the case to May 22, 2019.

A first information report (FIR) on the case which our correspondent obtained from the court registry on Thursday, described the case as’Abduction with Intent to Commit Culpable Homicide and Wrongful Confinement.’

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The FIR dates the case to the 4th of April when it said it was reported to the police that sometime in March 2019, at Ungwa Magaji Ward in Yola town, Adamu Abdurahman abducted the teenage boys to an unknown destination and offered them intoxicated drugs and “had carnal knowledge of them through their anus.”

The FIR added that the 17-year-old boy, Sani Fidelis, was found sick few days later and admitted into the Specialist Hospital in Yola, while the 16-year-old boy, Cosmos Martins, was missing.

The FIR indicated that Adamu Abdurahman was arraigned in court on April 10, 2019 when he was first taken into prison custody.

One Phillip Wasa, the guardian of the 17-year-old Sani Fidelis who spoke further on the ordeal of the teenager and  his missing colleague, said both were out-of-school boys who had arrived Yola in search of menial jobs and were looking for the house of the ward head of Angwan Magaji in Yola Town, Yola South LGA, when they met the accused, Adamu Abdulrahman, who lied to the boys that he was the ward head and subsequently drove the boys to his house where the abduction saga began.

He said he laid hold of Sani Fidelis after the boy ran into him upon escaping from Adamu’s captivity, and that he took him to the authentic ward head with whom he reported the matter to the police.