AS the nation awaits sentencing of the two abductors next Thursday, June 22, 2023, this is how one of the victims was abducted a month before the survivors escaped.
A Judge, in the abduction court case of 13 women who were held hostage in Chalala, heard that on September 18, 2022, the last abducted victim, who will be referred to as RB, aged 21, received a phone call from her school mate and friend, who will be referred to as GS.
At this point, RB was talking to GS on phone not knowing that the friend had been abducted and was speaking under threats and violence from abductors James Bwalya and Mathews Sikaonga.
In the conversation, RB asked GS if she knew anyone who gave out loans because her boyfriend urgently needed the money.
GS then gave RB two phone numbers of people who gave out loans.
The following day, GS called RB and asked her to meet her at cosmopolitan mall so that RB could collect a laptop and a phone from her to be used as collateral for the loan her boyfriend urgently needed.
When RB got to the mall, she phoned GS who told her that she [RB] should instead wait for her [RB] boyfriend’s young brother who would bring the laptop and phone to her.
After 15minutes, Bwalya, the abductor, met RB at the mall and introduced himself as GS’s boyfriend’s brother.
Bwalya then told RB that he had ‘forgotten’ the said laptop and phone at his home in Chalala and asked that the two should go and collect the items.
The two then proceeded to Chalala and upon arrival, RB found Sikaonga and her schoolmate GS and another abducted girl, seated in the Livingroom.
At this point, GS informed RB that she had been kidnapped. Bwalya and Sikaonga ordered RB to sit down on the floor before slapping her and forced her to drink beer and dance sexually.
They slapped RB each time she tried to refuse dancing seductively or to drink beer until she bled from the nose before they took her to a pantry where she spent a night with 12 other girls abducted between March and August, 2022.
After five days, the two abductors called RB, grabbed her by the throat, chocked her to the point of losing breath and forced her to have sex with them under threat of death.
On October 2, 2022, the abductors asked RB to call her relatives and ask them to send money but she never gave them a satisfactory answers which invited torture.
The angered boys beat RB and the other women with iron bars, a one hour torture session which left RB with cuts on her buttocks, face and fingers.
The abductors threatened to kill all the 13 women if their parents failed to send money.
This was part of the facts read last Thursday, May 8, before Lusaka High Court Judge Charles Kafunda in the case Bwalya and Sikaonga pleaded guilty to 54 counts of rape, abduction, assault and others.
(Mwebantu, Monday, 12th June, 2023)
