The path to a final reckoning can be long, winding through the murky waters of human evil and the unyielding pursuit of justice. It often begins not with a grand plan, but with a simple journey interrupted. In September 2018, Major General Idris Alkali, a senior officer in the Nigerian Army, set out from Abuja for Bauchi.
His route took him through the familiar highlands of Jos, Plateau State. Near Dura-Du village, he made a final phone call. Then, silence. His phone went dead, his black Toyota Corolla vanished, and for his family, a terrifying void opened up.
This week, the silence was broken in a Jos High Court, not by the voice of the missing general, but by the solemn testimony of the man tasked to find him. Retired Major General Umaru Ibrahim Muhammed, who led the official search and rescue operation, offered a chilling, detailed narrative that pulled back the curtain on a crime of profound brutality and revealed a pond that served as a watery tomb for the region's missing.
"Find Him Dead or Alive": The Dogged Search Begins
Tasked with a grim threefold mission—to find General Alkali, locate his vehicle, and identify those responsible—then-Garrison Commander Muhammed began his work with a team of a major general and 30 soldiers. The initial search of hospitals and police stations yielded nothing. A digital trail, however, led them to MTN. The last signal from Alkali's phone was traced to the area around Dura-Du village.
It was there that the search centered, and there that it met its first major obstacle. As the military focused on a particular mining pond, the local community mobilized. "The youths of the village mobilised about 500 women to protest against us searching the pond," General Muhammed testified. Despite the resistance, the team pressed on, importing fire service trucks from Taraba State and divers from Bauchi to drain the murky water.
What they found beneath the surface was far more than one missing vehicle.
A Watery Crypt: The Chilling Discovery in the Pond
After weeks of labor, on September 29, 2018, the breakthrough came. From the depths, they recovered General Alkali’s black Toyota Corolla. Inside were his personal effects: his uniform, shirt, shoes, and cap, each bearing his name—a ghostly confirmation of his fate.
But the pond held more secrets. In the days that followed, a macabre inventory emerged. They discovered a bus whose driver had vanished seven years prior. They found a red Rover car, its owner from Bisichi also declared missing in the same area. The grim tally continued with tipper lorries, tricycles, and motorcycles, all sunk and forgotten. Dura-Du's mining pond was not just a body of water; it was a dumping ground for the region's dark mysteries, a secret archive of crimes.
From a Shallow Grave to a Mortuary Table: Tracing the Body
With the vehicle found, the mission narrowed to the recovery of the general’s remains. Intelligence work led to the arrest of a suspect who directed the search team to a location known as "no man’s land." There, he confessed, General Alkali had been dragged through the village after his murder and buried in a shallow grave.
The army brought in sniffer dogs from Abuja, trained on the scent of Alkali’s shirt. The dogs led them to the site, but the grave was empty. The body had been moved. Through further investigation, the team learned the killers had enlisted a local mortician to exhume and relocate the remains.
When the body was finally recovered and examined by pathologists, the full horror of the crime was laid bare. In court, General Muhammed described a scene of almost unimaginable savagery. "The pathologists rearranged the entire body to show us how he was killed. His head was smashed… they butchered him into pieces, all parts of his body. That showed us he was gruesomely murdered by the suspects."
The Echo in the Courtroom: More Than One Case
General Muhammed’s testimony, delivered as a principal witness, was not merely a recounting of a past investigation. It was a foundational brick in the ongoing murder trial, a formal, legal airing of facts that had long been the subject of rumor and report. His words connected the dots from a missing person’s report to a premeditated, barbaric killing, and implicated a community pond as a silent accomplice to multiple crimes.
The story of General Idris Alkali is, tragically, more than the story of one man. It is a stark emblem of the lawlessness that can fester in ungoverned spaces. The Dura-Du pond, with its cargo of multiple vehicles and untold stories, stands as a haunting metaphor for unresolved violence.
As the courtroom in Jos seeks justice for one high-profile victim, the dark waters of that pond whisper of many others still waiting for their names to be called, for their stories to be dragged into the light, and for the evil within the heart of man to finally be answered.
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