Mireille Marie-Laure Owona, the principal of Government High School Leclerc in Yaoundé, has formally denied a rumor shared on social networks reporting the kidnapping of students from her school.
“Contrary to the voice that has gone viral on social networks, no student from the Government High School Leclerc has been kidnapped to date,” she said, in a press release made public on Tuesday, November 7. In the audio shared the same day in particular on WhatsApp and which our colleague SBBC listened to, a lady, who presents herself as the mother of a student enrolled in this public secondary school, warns of the “kidnapping” of five students of the said high school, including his daughter.
Based on the words of her offspring, the lady in question says that a man made the students smell perfumes who subsequently fainted. Taking advantage of their unconsciousness, the individual in question then put them in a car and took an unknown destination. His daughter, who woke up along the way, would have taken advantage of the fact that the man stopped to urinate in “Nkometou forest” to flee, after having tried in vain to wake up her comrades.
After a long walk “in the bush”, the teenager then found herself at the Nkometou high school (locality in the Obala district, in the Lékié division) where “a man spotted her”, and thanks to which she was able to contact her mother to inform her of the situation. But the principal assures that no student in her high school has been the victim of kidnapping, while it is said that the student in question, returning home late, would have skipped classes and would have invented this story to escape to the thunder of his parents.
At Leclerc high school, officials ask parents to “remain vigilant” and ensure that “activities continue peacefully under the supervision of highly qualified staff”. This case comes at a time when the phenomenon of kidnapping and disappearance of children is becoming recurrent in Cameroon. The most publicized case in recent days is that of the young student from the Collège de la Retraite who was kidnapped for ransom in Yaoundé and who was subsequently found by the police.
SBBC