Meet Kenyan woman who kidnapped herself

A Kenyan woman staged her own kidnapping to extort money from her father, sparking a nationwide hunt by elite units of the police.

Ms Maureen Odera (left) made teary calls to her father claiming she was in the hands of brutal abductors who would kill her if he did not send Sh150,000.

All the while, Ms Odera was living in lodgings with her boyfriend.

Police finally tracked her to Migori town, after wasting many hours and a tidy sum of taxpayers’ money.

Nigerian boyfriend

The woman, who teaches at a school in Garissa, claimed she was snatched on Jogoo Road on 2 July on her way from Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, where she had gone to pick up her Nigerian boyfriend. She had travelled from Garissa to the city on the day she pretended to have been “kidnapped.”

Her father, concerned for her safety, called the police and the media. Police claim to have launched one of their biggest secret operations to rescue her and arrest her alleged kidnappers.

The operation involved the Flying Squad and the Special Crime Prevention Unit.

“A signal was sent from Vigilance House to all commanders directing that operations be launched to track and apprehend the kidnappers,” a top police officer said.

The officers raided criminal hideouts in Dandora, Kawangware and Kayole.

With the help of mobile phone service providers, Ms Odera’s distress calls were tracked to Western Kenya and the search finally narrowed down to Migori. The hunt ended in the lodging from which she had been making the “distress” calls.

Officers were puzzled by a bus ticket they found in her possession. It showed that she travelled to Kisumu on Wednesday last week, a day after the alleged kidnapping.

They also found her with receipts showing that she had been paying Sh200 every night for the lodging since Wednesday.

Further inquiries revealed that she had been staying in the room with a man was later released since there was no evidence linking him to any crime.

But they charged Ms Odera with giving false information and she pleaded guilty to the charge. She was ordered held at Buru Buru Police Station, awaiting sentencing at the Makadara courts on Tuesday.

Police have warned of rising cases of staged kidnappings in which people plan their own abductions to extort money from relatives.

A magistrate was recently charged after detectives said that she had made up a story that she had been abducted as a ploy to extort money from her husband.

In the recent past, six other people have been abducted by armed kidnappers while a lecturer, a soldier, an accountant and an advertising executive have been released after paying ransoms, according to police records. Those who have paid ransoms prefer to keep their identities secret for fear of retribution.

And in separate incidents, two men were lured into the kidnappers’ hands by their girlfriends. One of them said he was called by a girlfriend but on getting to her house was abducted.

Call friends

The gang members forced him at gunpoint to call friends and relatives asking them to send him money via M-Pesa. A total of Sh180,000 was sent to him.

The other cases involved a man whose girlfriend also delivered him into the kidnappers’ hands while the other received a call from a cousin working with abductors.

In yet another incident, a bar owner in Kayole, Mr Edward Kanyonyo, was kidnapped four weeks ago. His daughter Susan, on Monday told the Nation that the kidnappers have stopped calling.

Previously, they had called to demand Sh2 million which had been reduced to Sh100,000 by the time they stopped making demands.