FEATURE: Anguish, despair as train passengers spend 57 days in captivity

Every night, Sa’idu Marafa goes to bed around 12 a.m. He keeps his phone under his pillow in anticipation of a phone call he has been waiting for since March 28. It has been 50 days of waiting.

Whenever his phone rings he hopes it is a call that will tell him his brother has been released from captivity. His brother, Auwal Marafa, was among the passengers of the Kaduna-bound train that was attacked by bandits.

A day after the attack, Mr Marafa said he got a call from one of his brother’s abductors. Before the call, his family was worried that he was shot during the attack that left nine people dead.

He could not be reached on the phone, and he was not among the dead and the injured taken to the 44 Nigerian Army Reference Hospital, where victims of the attack were taken and were being treated. They thought maybe he was shot, and his body was not retrieved.

“When the call came in, I took a sigh and answered. I had been following the development…