For a few seconds, Zainab Abdullahi Giginyu had her back to her 2-year-old daughter, in their home in Kawo quarters. When she turned, Ummulkhair had disappeared without trace.

It was a short distance from where the toddler was seated – eating – to the line where the mother had gone to dry clothes.

It would be unimaginable to think something sinister had happened in such a-twinkle-of-an-eye moment.

The thought that Ummulkhair’s older siblings were at school that Friday morning, which meant she could not have strayed with them, compounded the puzzle for the mother.

It happened so quickly that she needed to unravel it fast.

Then she thought she had a clue.

“I went into the room to see if she had gone in to take a nap,” she remembered her situation that minute, hunting for any lead, “but she was not there.”

“I dashed out shouting her name ‘Ummulkhair, Ummulkhair, Ummulkhair’ but there was no answer so I ran out of the house, asking anyone that I could find around if they had seen somebody taking a little girl away. But nobody said they saw anything,” Zainab recalled her daughter’s mysterious disappearance in 2017.

Extended family members, friends and neighbours went all out in search for the little girl for days without coming close to a useful lead.

At the mercy of kidnappers

Strewn with rutted and dusty roads, narrow streets and open drainages, Kawo is a choice neighbourhood for many a low-income earner in Kano State.

Residents here, who were no strangers to activities of petty criminals, drug merchants and violent thugs, fighting turf wars, saw all these evil being displaced and overtaken by Boko Haram, when it came on the scene in 2009 and took charge.

The insurgents trailed and shot security officers within its labyrinth of streets and forced the only police outpost complementing the security of the densely populated community to close.

As Boko Haram receded, residents awoke to a new challenge of child kidnapping.

At the time Zainab’s daughter went missing, suspected child traffickers were deeply entrenched in cells around her neighbourhood and adjoining areas, like Tinshama, Haye, Hotoro, Yankaba and Dakata quarters.

Those places too were brimming with cases of missing children, believed to have fallen victims to traffickers.

Before the state government’s Commission of Inquiry that was set up in October 2019, investigated “the disturbing scenario”, over 100 kids had gone missing with 80 per cent coming from those areas.

In its report that was seen by this newspaper, the commission “discovered… that children were kidnapped at such tender ages of 3-5 years” from 10am to 12pm on Fridays and 80 percent of the kidnapping occurred between 5pm and 8pm.

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