With the heart-rending image of the innocent baby delivered in a terror dungeon, it should dawn on members of the National Assembly who recently criminalized payment of ransom how dead that legislation will be if eventually signed into law. Which father or relative won’t give an arm or a leg to prevent their offspring from being born into the hands of terrorists? Pictures have since gone viral of the newborn girl dressed in a thick pink dress and a light lemon sweat cap, with her eyes closed. The chilling image queries how low it can get before the authorities wake up to their responsibilities. Nigeria failed her and her expectant mother.


The woman, in her eighth month of pregnancy, was among captives taken into the bush that fateful night by terrorists operating in Kaduna State. These terrorists, suspected to be Ansaru, a breakaway faction of the Boko Haram sect, had on March 28, 2022, planted explosives on the rail track which demobilized an AK9 Abuja – Kaduna train, enabling them to kill at least nine passengers and injuring several others.

Out of the 63 abducted train passengers taken by them into captivity after the attack, only the Managing Director of the Bank of Agriculture (BoA), Alwan Hassan, was released after purportedly paying N100 million ransom. The abductors however did a video to say his release was because he is an elderly man and in the spirit of Ramadan. As for the other captives, the terrorists pegged their freedom on the government releasing some of their commanders being incarcerated.

Nigerians have endued different shades of the horrors of terrorism but the sight of a hapless infant born into captivity is quite sombre. Her mother’s only crime was that she boarded a public train from Abuja to Kaduna even as the infant’s only undoing is to be in this clime. The terrorists, in a showboating move, have chosen to tug at everyone’s heartstrings by releasing the pictures of the healthy-looking baby who they saw to her delivery right there in the forest. A bundle of joy expected to be born into the warmth of loving arms has turned into a source of concern as regards how well-being in that most harrowing and harshest of conditions.



Naija News is alarmed that the state of insecurity in Nigeria has so degenerated that unborn babies and infants are allowed to remain under the tight grip of terrorists. How more brutish can life be? We recall that relatives of the abducted victims had embarked on protests, tasking the government to see to the release of their loved ones. After a video of the abductees urging the federal government’s intervention surfaced online, the traumatized relatives addressed a press conference.

According to their spokesperson, “We are appealing to them to open a channel of discussion with the bandits and get our loved ones out as quickly as possible. We have been in serious anguish over the past 15 days. Many of us have not been sleeping. We are like living corpses”. They followed this up with a trip to the Headquarters of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), where one of them collapsed overwhelmed by misery. Their leader, Aliya Mahmoud, said, “There is a two-year-old. For God’s sake, we can only imagine what they’re going through. We have an aged woman of 85 years she is there helplessly just like the others”.



The distraught families cited the case of two pregnant abductees one of whom was said to have a history of delivering through cesarean section. While it’s unclear if the woman that has just been delivered of a baby is the one with a CS antecedent, it is highly reprehensible for the federal government and security agencies not to be moved by the condition of these women into going all out to secure their release. These are people who paid and were onboard the Nigeria Railway Corporation train when they were attacked.

SOURCE: https://www./2022/04/29/abuja-kaduna-train-as-nigeria-fails-even-the-unborn/