The Vanguard reports a disturbing account from Henry Edobor Okunrobo, a 47-year-old horticulturist, who survived a harrowing ten-day kidnapping ordeal involving ritualistic elements.
“After seven days of being in captivity, the herbalist came in with the men that kidnapped me. I knew I was the subject of their discussion,” Okunrobo reveals, describing his time at the first location. He details the tense moments that followed: “The herbalist then pointed at me while speaking with my captors with anger in his voice. Later I was asked to stand up and was led outside the house.”
His captors then made a chilling decision. “When we got outside the building, one of the men said, ‘let’s take him to the other man’, and they all agreed,” Okunrobo recounts. Despite his emotional pleas for freedom, he was transported to a second location: “I begged them to let me go with tears in my eyes but instead they took me inside their car and I was taken to another herbalist not very far from the first herbalist.”
At the second location, Okunrobo discovered he wasn’t alone. “At the second herbalist’s place where I spent three days, seven of us were there as captives. We were being called one after the other,” he states. The situation grew increasingly dire as Okunrobo observed that those called to the shrine never returned.
However, an unexpected physical characteristic would prove to be his salvation. As Okunrobo recalls, “When it was my turn, I was called to enter the shrine but nothing happened. Then I heard the herbalist shouting in Yoruba language, ‘who brought this incomplete man here? Do you want to spoil my shrine? The gods can’t accept this disabled man unless you can find his missing teeth.'”
This remarkable account reveals how Okunrobo’s missing teeth, viewed as a physical imperfection by his captors, paradoxically became his means of survival in what appears to have been a ritualistic kidnapping operation.