Herdsmen: Bereaved son narrates how his family found his mother's raped and beheaded body in a farm in Edo

Suspected herdsmen raped and beheaded a woman identified as Margaret Udiamehi at Ekpoma, Esan West local government area in Edo state on Tuesday June 20th. When she went to her farm and did not return home, her family went in search for her and found her decapitated body, raped and lying by the roadside [see here]

In an interview with Vanguard, the eldest son of the deceased, Joseph, recounted how they found her remains. Read it after the cut...

“My mother went to the farm in the morning. At about 4pm when she had not unusually not returned, we started wondering what happened. We became scared and I rushed to the police station to report that my mother was missing. The policemen told me to give them 24 hours. I went home but I was agitated. I called my brother that we should go and look for her in the farm. We searched for her and later found her dead body without head in the farm. They raped her and beheaded her and that is the trade mark of herdsmen who operate in our area. We rushed to call the police and it was when they came that we started searching for her head and we found it somewhere around the farm. 

 

The police took the body to the mortuary. We are devastated because my mother was the breadwinner of the family. I don’t have a job, I have just been managing my life. In fact, we are confused. Just last year, her (mother) daughter lost the husband and my father died years ago and, since then, she has been the one shouldering the responsibility of the family. My mother was not sick, she was hale and hearty before she went to the farm. And the worst of it all is that the herdsmen did not only kill her, they raped her before beheading her. 

 

The herdsmen are the ones we see that operate in our farms. A ritualists would have taken away the head and will not rape her, it is only Fulani herdsmen that operate that way and we have many of them in our area. You can imagine that with her age she was raped by these evil people who are here to destroy our people.

 

 Our hunters went into the bush but we have not seen them. Each time they operate this way they disappear but I don’t think we will continue to condone this in our communities. Women are now scared of going to the farm, so what are going to do now for a living. This is destabilizing and I don’t know how we are going to cope with the situation because she was the breadwinner”he said