Armed robbers force LAUTECH students to have sex with one another

A Bimbola (not real name) agreed to narrate her ordeal to Punch last Monday, the dry white handkerchief she was holding became soaked with tears. She tried to stop weeping for a while, but she couldn’t resist it, and the more her friend who followed her to the meeting tried to calm her down, the more she struggled to hold back her tears. What she passed through in August was painful, unimaginable and dehumanising. In fact, she might not be able to forget that night in her life..

Ever since the incident, everything about her has changed, according to her friend.

In the night of August 13, 2015 around 12 midnight she said she and her roommate had returned from a night reading class in preparation for their forthcoming exam in November, locked their room and were about to sleep when they heard their hostel mates jamming their doors, screaming and walking up the hostel stairs.

Before they knew what was happening, the men were at their door and expectedly, they forced the door open. “Come out now or we will kill you,” she recalled what the men told her and her roommate, and with fear and trembling, the girls did their bidding.

Three hefty fearful-looking men, clad in black polos and jeans, armed with guns, machetes and axes had stormed their hostel located in the Under G Area of Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Ogbomoso, Oyo State and demanded that all the students, both male and female, should gather in one room.

While one of the hoodlums stayed with the students, pointing guns at them should they ‘misbehave,’ the other two locked the entrance to the hostel, ransacked all rooms one after the other, stole the students’ laptops, money, debit cards, tablets and mobile phones.

But even after stealing all their property, the robbers were not done. The next command they gave the students was what Bimbola has not yet got over with.

She narrated, “They raped some girls in our presence, but not only that, they asked us to start having sex with ourselves. They called from among us a guy and a girl and asked them to have sex with themselves, right in everybody’s presence. They threatened to use their weapons on us if we didn’t cooperate. Then they asked all of us to strip naked. Since it was in the night, most of us ladies already had only our night gowns on, while most of the guys were just putting on boxers. They said we should all be naked. When they were satisfied, they called another pair of students to do the same thing and told everybody to watch.

“For about three hours, they dehumanised us, humiliated us. Unfortunately, nobody in the next hostel knew what was going on; if anyone knew, they would have helped us to call the police or the Student Union Government officials.”

But what was more pathetic about Bimbola’s story was that she didn’t just witness the whole action; she was also asked to have sex with a guy she never dated. “Everything happened like it was a dream. They pointed at a guy I knew as my junior and asked him to do ‘it’ with me. When I refused, they slapped me and I fell. I had no option than to do it. I looked at my roommate and she was already shedding tears for me. How humiliated I was!” she cried.

She further told Punch, “It was not a night to remember. I wish I could erase it from my memory. My friend and I returned to the hostel that night after reading in the school because our exam is fast approaching. If I knew something like that would happen, I would have stayed in the school till the morning, but I needed to prepare for the following day’s work. I had just finished having a shower when my roommate and I observed something was wrong. There was no light, so we couldn’t see properly, but we observed that our hostel mates were all jamming their doors at some men’s command.

“They cramped all of us in one of the rooms upstairs and we were all frightened. My parents are not yet aware of this incident and I don’t wish to share it with anyone again. I only agreed to speak to you because my friend here encouraged me to and I feel something should be done by the authorities concerned to stop this barbarism. I know I’ll be fine soon.”