In the first six months of this year, the Nigeria police said 25 persons between the ages of two and 78 years were missing in Abia State.
A breakdown of the persons indicated that there are two boys and eight girls aged below 17, while eight and seven were males and females respectively of 18 and above
The state command’s police public relations officer (PPRO), superintendent Geoffrey Ogbonna stated this yesterday in his office at the police headquarters in Umuahia, the state capital.
Ogbonna said hope was not lost on finding them as the command had not relented in its “avowed efforts in searching for them and preventing other crimes and criminalities in the state.”
He said there had been instances when such persons either returned home or were later found and reunited with their families but their relatives failed to report it to the police, due to reasons best known to them.
Ogbonna said unfortunately, the attitude had been giving the general public and outsiders the wrong impression that either such persons were never found or the police was not on top of the situation.
According to him, “recently, some people sighted a teenage girl in a neighborhood where she had gone to visit her boyfriend after she had been declared missing by her parents and when they confronted her, she quickly ran back home.
“Courtesy demands that and for our records, after the person had been seen, even found dead, we should be informed about it to update our records and to stop the endless search.”
