“She said she did not know how she got to Kano. She said she was kept mostly in places she could not recognise. She said they moved her often from one place to another often”, a source close to kidnapped Bayelsa teenager, Ese Oruru, revealed to Punch Newspapers.

Ese was in August 2016, abducted from her native Bayelsa state and taken to Kano state by a customer of her mother Yunusa ‘Yellow’ Dahiru. She was allegedly converted to Islam and forced into a marriage.

Following the public outrage the abduction generated, after the girls parents told a newspaper about their ordeal, Ese was finally found in Kano and returned to her troubled parents.

Yunusa, who is currently in police custody facing criminal prosecution, denies the charge of abducting Ese and converting her to Islam.

However, the question remains of what condition the 14 year old girl is in? How traumatized is she from her seven months ordeal in an unfamiliar environment, surrounded by unknown faces and going through unknown, possibly inhumane, acts.

According to the Punch, the girl is still traumatized by her experience but is gradually regaining her confidence.

Ese, who said that she doesn’t remember how she got to the northern city of Kano or how she left Bayelsa, also said that she only realized that she was in a strange place when she got to Kano.

Her conversion was done the same day they arrived Kano and that she was given a concoction to drink. Regularly, she went through a religious recitation while she was in Kano and only came to full consciousness when she was about leaving Kano.

Ese, who had learnt to speak the predominant Hausa language, never went to regular or Islamic school while she was in Kano, the source said.

“She said she saw Yunusa come there at times, but it seems, for now, she does not recollect how he had raped her, because she is still traumatised about the whole thing. She also said there were other girls like her there.”

Yesterday, Nobel Laurate, Wole Soyinka, and prominent Human rights lawyer, Femi Falana, warned against giving the abduction a religious interpretation, as many have already began to do.