A bus conductor of an Executive Bus company plying Nairobi-Mombasa route shared tale story on social media how he saved a teenage girl from a sex predator on Wednesday, June 2, after she boarded their bus plying Nairobi-Mombasa route to meet a man he had allegedly me on Facebook.
According to the conductor, they were forced to accommodate the teenage girl at their Mombasa office and return her back to Machakos before reporting the matter to the police.
The girl is reported to have boarded the bus at Machakos Junction headed to the coast to meet a stranger she had contact with on Facebook but first lied to the conductor that she was going to visit meet her brother who stays in Mariakani.
When the conductor asked her to pay her bus fare amounting to Sh1,500, the girl had Sh500, saying that she promised to settle the balance before they reached Mtito Andei, after a phone conversation with the said brother, she promised to settle the balance before they reached Mtito a Ndei, a promise that was not honoured.
After failing to settle the bus fare, the conductor became suspicious and decided to know the true identity of the person the teenager was going to meet and whether that person was truly her brother. He then called the stranger the girl had introduced as a brother asking him to come to the bus stop for the girl and settle the remaining Sh1000.
The conductor called the man and tricked him that they had arrived in Mariakani. He asked him to come at the bus stop and pick the girl as he settled the balance, but the man told him to send the girl to Kaloleni by a motorbike, where she would meet him then he would settle the balance.
Fearing for the young girl’s safety and tired of being taken on a wild-goose chase, the conductor decided to go with the girl to Mombasa, where her safety was assured.
It is then that the girl intimated that the man whom she was about to meet was not her brother but a stranger with whom they had only established contact through Facebook.
The bus finally arrived in Mombasa at around 4:30pm, but the man didn’t show up until later in the evening at 8pm. What followed shocked the staff of executive bus services, when the teenager said that the man who had come to pick her up was not the man she had been chatting with, adding that he did not resemble the person appearing on the facebook page.
The bus company was forced to return the girl to Machakos Junction after she disowned the man who had come to pick her, saying he did not resemble the man they had been chatting with on Facebook.
The conductor who shared this information intimated that such cases were rampant, and even cited another case where a 17-year old girl who had just sat her KCSE, boarded their bus at Matuu and alighted at Mombasa to meet a man she didn’t know, only a day after the previous incident.
Detectives from the Anti Human Trafficking and Child Protection Unit also shared the same information on their Twitter handle
The detectives are currently pursuing the suspects.
Meanwhile, Directorate of Criminal Investigation officers have warned parents and guardians of a new trend being used by sexual predators to prey on young girls. They advised parents to monitor their children’s online activities and the people they socialise with, since cases of young girls being abducted for slavery and sexual exploitation are on the rise.
Detectives said the predators target the school-going girls and those who have just completed their secondary school education through social media.
