The Iseyin town has been thrown into palpable tension as on Saturday afternoon, four farm workers from the Agric Settlement area in Iseyin had been abducted by gunmen who according to report were armed to the teeth.
The four kidnapped farm workers according to report were working in a sizable poultry farm inside the community before the ugly incident.
It was learnt that several other farmers managed to escape from being abducted and have given the account of their ordeal in the hands of the Kidnappers.
The escapees said the kidnappers were roughly ten in number, equipped with high-tech weapons and outfitted in army camouflage.
Many of the farmers in the farm settlement along the Iseyin-Ipapo-Saki route obtained the land for farming purposes on lease from the State Ministry of Agriculture.
As of late on Saturday night, a group of Amotekun men, soldiers, and police officers were exploring the settlement’s broad area in the direction of the Okeho, Itesiwaju local government axis, where the kidnappers were spotted traveling with the victims.
The search squad was still pursuing the kidnappers on Sunday morning as they headed towards the Okeho forest, according to Mr. Adepoju, the chairman of the Farm Settlement Association.
“It is extremely bad that this is now occurring in our neighborhood. After the government asked us to start a farm and we did, kidnappers will likely take us as they would like a chicken.
“Those kidnappers arrived with advanced weapons that our Amotekun men do not possess. I appreciate the bravery of our security officers because while they were pursuing the men in army camouflage, we could hear the difference in the sounds they were making,” said one of them.
The kidnapped farm workers who were abducted have not yet been identified, which has generated concern in the Iseyin community.
The rate at which kidnappers operate in the Oke-Ogun and Ibarapa region of Oyo State without any meaningful response from the security forces was regretted by some of individuals our guys spoke with on Saturday evening.
They alerted the federal and state governments to the issue since, in their opinion, the surge of kidnappings could start to have an impact on the local economies as farmers and businesspeople might find it difficult to go out and conduct their trades out of dread of kidnappers.