A man has allegedly defiled a four-year-old girl in Kontagora area of Niger State, after abducting her from her parents while they all slept in front of their house due to the hot weather condition.
PUNCH reports that when the parents woke up, they could not find the girl and thought she sleep-walked while they were asleep.
They raised an alarm which led their neighbours to join in the search for the little girl.
It reportedly took several hours before a neighbour found the missing girl at a refuse dump site with blood running down her thigh.
Following this discovery, the rescue team suspected the worst and took her back to her father.
The girl’s father describing what happened, said: “We were outside our house due to the heat, but I later told the family to go inside because the breeze had started blowing and before long I went into the house to sleep.
“I woke up again and noticed that they were still sleeping, so I woke them up to enter the house because it was also getting late. When they entered, my wife said she didn’t see one of my daughters. So we started looking for her, thinking she must have woken up and entered another place in her deep-sleep condition.
“When we couldn’t find her, it was then it dawned on us that someone must have carried her away while we were asleep. We raised an alarm, and neighbours came out and assisted us to search for the little girl till 3am.
“Later, when the early morning prayers were called, and we still did not find her, we all decided to go and pray. After the 5am prayers, people came to tell us that she had been found in a refuse dump site and could not stand up by herself.
“When we asked her how she got there, she told us that she was taken to an uncompleted building by an unknown person. When we did a thorough check on her, we noticed blood stains in between her legs, and we concluded that she must have been raped,” Abubakar said.
“We took her to the Kontagora General Hospital. The hospital staff checked her and they said her situation was beyond them and that if we are willing, they will give us a referral letter to take her to Sokoto State where they believe her case will be adequately attended to.
“We agreed, and the hospital management took the responsibility of conveying her and the mother to the hospital in Sokoto, payment of the bill, feeding and return home.
“The treatment took two weeks, and she was discharged to return home. The hospital management told us to observe her and bring her back for the second operation in six weeks. But when we returned Dr. Fati and her staff from the Kontagora General Hospital came and ran a check on her and left.
“Later in the evening she called to inform me that while checking my daughter they noticed some issues and asked me to prepare along side her grand mother to come to Minna to run another check,” he said.
“It is an act of God or a temptation which God allowed. I leave everything to God. I thank the hospital management for the assistance my family got. Without assistance from the hospital, it would have been very difficult to handle the situation. Currently, I can barely feed my family
“The hospital through the support of Dr. Fati paid and took care of everything. They asked us not to pay anything for the treatment, and we are grateful to her and her team in the hospital. I have been suffering with no peace of mind for a whole year after relocating from Gulbin-Boka, my ancestral home town to Kontagora due to insecurity.
“In spite of the hot weather condition while there, we were usually forced to sleep in doors because of fear of attacks,” he said.
