Obscure Occurrences : A Human Slaughterhouse

 Motorcycle taxi drivers are called Okadas in Nigeria and Ibadan (one of Nigeria’s biggest cities) houses a lot of Okadas. Despite their high numbers, the Ibadan Okadas were a tight-knit community predominantly made of young men. In 2014 two of these Okadas went missing and this community immediately figured it out and approached the police. Since the police did not seem to do much about it, the community decided to do a search of their own. They drove to every nook and corner of the city but found no clue about the missing men. 

Lanre goes missing

 On March 22^nd of the same year, another Okada vanished. He was a young man named Lanre and unlike the other two who went missing while at home, he went missing while working. He was last seen with two passengers on his bike. After waiting for quite some time, the other Okadas tried calling him. Lanre always had two phones with him one of which was used for work and the other was his personal one. They tried reaching out to both his phones, but uncharacteristically he did not attend their calls. After a few minutes, one of them suddenly got a call from his personal number. When they picked it up, they heard Lanre frantically asking for help. He told them that he was kidnapped by unknown people and was put in an underground prison along with 8 other people. They took off all his belongings before putting him in this prison but he somehow managed to take his personal phone with him.

 When they asked him his exact location, he told them he was somewhere inside the Soka forest but he did not know his exact location. However, he told them the exact way to reach the path that led to his location. He told them that if they followed his directions, they would reach a place with burnt cars. Once they reached that place, he asked them to continue walking down the path until they heard the screams of the people in the prison. Before they could ask him to stay on line, the call was abruptly cut. His phone was never reachable again.

 So, around 40 Okadas of the locality followed his directions and reached the place with burnt cars. Once they reached this place, they started to silently walk on the path that went into the forest. As they were walking, a man with a gun suddenly jumped from a tree in front of them and started firing at them. They ran back to their bikes and fled the place immediately.

The Discovery

 Although petrified, they were determined to save Lanre. So, they gathered 60 more Okadas from the neighbouring localities and went back to that place again. They were armed with weapons this time and made angry noises when they walked through that path. They were expecting resistance but they found no one. They eventually reached the bank of a river and on the other side of the river were a shank and a warehouse. When they looked for a way to cross the river, they saw an old bridge that connected the two banks of the river. While walking on this bridge, they found Lanre’s bike under this bridge and this made the group confident that Lanre was present inside one of those buildings. They rushed into the shank but it only had piles of clothes and shoes and nothing else.

 After completely checking this shank, they proceeded towards the warehouse. This warehouse was encircled by a fence that had barbed wire on top. They managed to cut a hole in this fence and started walking around this building looking for an entrance. The building was eerily quiet and emitted an extremely foul smell. After circling the building for quite some time, they finally found a door made of metal sheets that gave entry into the building. They cut through this door and managed to enter the building. The moment they entered this building, their anger turned into fear and horror because of what they saw.

Brutality

 There was another way that led directly to the frontal portion of this warehouse and this way was wide enough for one vehicle to pass through. The locals reported that one black jeep with tinted windows passed through this way almost every weeknight at around 8 p.m. While they were sure that it led to the warehouse, they were not sure about its origin. They said that the vehicle returned back at around 9:30 p.m. In between this duration, they heard horrible screams coming from the warehouse in the woods. They reached out to the police but they never took this seriously and thus, they learned to adapt to this cyclic event. This kept happening for more than a decade. Only if the police actually took their complaints seriously, they could have stopped the terrible things happening in the warehouse.

 This warehouse was used for making and selling a highly valued, illegal substance. It was used to chop and sell human body parts on the black market. This man on the jeep, abducted victims took them to this warehouse, tied them up and severed their body parts. If the victim could be saved after the amputation, they chained him up to the walls to be used later but if they could not be saved, they killed them brutally by feeding them to crocodiles.

 This is exactly what those Okadas saw. They saw heavily malnourished people with missing body parts chained to the wall with the butcher slab in between them. The floor was filled with human bones with some of them still having flesh attached to them. They immediately started releasing and rescuing these people and in total, they rescued 23 people but Lanre was not among them. They swept the entire place in search of an entry to the underground prison but they could never find it. They tried asking the rescued people but they either did not know or were no longer able to speak.

Aftermath

 The police took control of this place and despite the Okadas begging them to find this underground prison, demolished the warehouse. However, the Okadas did not give up and tried manually digging through the warehouse but their fellow Okada was never found. Also, the people behind the warehouse events were never found and their identity stays obscure.