Dura, a community in Du District, the outskirt of Jos South local government area of Plateau State has a pond where bodies of slain persons are disposed of, for cover-up.
The remains of Late General Idris Alkali who was declared missing in 2018 was later recovered in the community.
General Alkali was then the immediate Chief of Administration (Army), recently disengaged from the services of the Nigerian Army after 35 years of meritorious service, never died on the battlefield but fought many wars in the pond.
He was in transit in his black Toyota Corolla with MUN 679 AA from Abuja to Bauchi on August 30, 2018, but disappeared at Dura-Du. His car was reportedly stopped and he introduced himself as a general to the hoodlums who had barricaded the road. Unfortunately, the senior officer was gruesomely killed.
It was gathered that General Alkali’s crime was in his transit on a day some residents were protesting over the killing of 11 people in Lafande Community, by armed robbers who attacked a shopping complex, killed and injured several others.
A moment after the killing of the general, the whole community went wild in jubilating over the murder of an innocent passerby.
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After killing him, they pushed the blame on the Nigerian Army with an allegation that the Army secretly murdered one of their senior officers because he was privy to the facts of the Army’s boardroom games in sabotaging and prolonging the violence on the Plateau for pecuniary gains of top Army officers.
Wanted the world to believe that everyone was guilty of the crime except them, the District Head of Dura-Du community, Chief Yakubu Rap, allegedly co-chaired the meeting to relocate Alkali’s corpse from the shallow grave to a different location immediately after the discovery of Alkali’s car in the abandoned mines pit pond, according to Vanguard.
Besides the discovery of the general’s remains in the hostile community, more items believed to be of victims of a similar gory fate were discovered seven days after the military drained the pond.
HOW GENERAL ALI WAS LYNCHED
After the late General was declared missing on September 3, 2018, the Nigerian Army launched a search and rescue operation led by Major General Umaru Ibrahim Muhammed (rtd) to find him dead or alive.
Muhammed who appeared before the Jos high court, on Wednesday, October 25, 2023, as a principal witness, said late General Alkali was gruesomely murdered and his body dismembered before he was buried in a shallow grave named ‘No Man’s Land’.
“Late Gen Alkali left Abuja for Bauchi en route to Jos in 2018, while on transit, he made the last call around Dura Du village in Jos South. And from that moment, his phone went off. He never got to Bauchi and he could not be accessed on the phone. Three days after, his family had to declare him missing, that was on the 3rd of September 2018,” Muhammed told the court on Wednesday.
He recalled that in the process of searching, youths of the village allegedly mobilised about 500 women to protest against – but they continued the assigned task.
After two weeks of intensive search, General Alkali’s Toyota Corolla vehicle with his uniform, shirt, shoe, and cap was discovered in a pond after the Muhammed’s led officers succeeded in evacuating water from the pond in Dura-Du village.
He said General Alkali’s body was dragged round the village before taking him to a location called “No man’s land” and buried him in a shallow grave.
“Further search made us understand that the killers got the service of a mortician who evacuated the body and packaged it in two bags. We got the mortician, and he led us to one Mr Stephen, and Mr Stephen eventually led us to another village called Buchwet which is 10km away from Dura-Du. That was where the remains of General Alkali was dumped, we recovered the body on the 30th of October 2018.
According to General Muhammed, after a thorough examination by experts on the late General’s remains, “study shows that the killers sliced the skull into two and pieced all parts of his body.
MORE VICTIMS
It became obvious that General Alkali was not the only victim of Dura-Du atrocities. In the course of their search for the slain senior officer, more bodies were made.
General Muhammed said: “We continued our search in the pond, on October 1, we saw a bus in the pond whose driver was declared missing seven years earlier. We also saw a Rover car, red colour, the owner resides in Bisichi, he was declared missing in the same village. Inside that pond were Tipper lorry, tricycles, motorcycles etc.”
In 2021, an Islamic advocacy group, Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC) insisted that there had been a strong suspicion for a long time thousands of travellers particularly Muslims who took that route were known to have gone missing in Dura-Du.
“The recent killing of thirty-two (32) Muslim travellers who were going to Ikare in Ondo State on Saturday, 14th August 2021 is another pointer. It shows that the killers of Muslims have not reneged. The five buses which conveyed those killed would have been driven and pushed under the huge ponds of Jos, never to be seen again, had security agents not raced to the scene of the crime.
“We recall that several vehicles were also found beneath the same pond in which the general’s car was found. Among the vehicles was an 18-seater bus. Where were the occupants? Where were the owners of several other vehicles found inside the pond? Muslim travellers have been murdered in cold blood in their thousands in Jos.
“It is noteworthy that hundreds of ponds like this littering the Jos metropolis. How many vehicles have been sunk under them? We may never know. It took the army several days before the Alkali pond was drained and its chilling contents discovered. It is just safe to conclude that thousands of Muslims have disappeared in the Jos zone of death.
