A viral video of a woman struggling to calm a wailing child inside a Nairobi-bound bus has been explained, and the matter sorted.
In the video, a 2-year-old child can be seen crying uncontrollably as a woman who was with him struggled to calm him down.
It was obvious that the woman was not the mother.
The passengers in the bus were forced to intervene; demanding to know if indeed she was the mother – with many suspecting her of kidnapping the child.
The driver was subsequently asked to call the Sacco management who in turn called the police.
The woman who had two children was taken to the Railways police station for interrogation with many who had seen the viral video already branding her a ‘child trafficker’.
According to the passengers who were in the bus, they suspected something was wrong when the child refused to calm down despite please by her aunt to contain him.
“She was asked to call the child’s mother on phone,” a passenger who was in the bus said.
One of the passengers went to the extent of insisting that he talks to the mother on phone to ascertain if indeed she knew the whereabouts of her children – and to confirm if she knew the woman who had her children.
Matters, however, came to a head after the woman on the other end of the line identified the child with a different name from the one the aunt had given in the bus after being pressured. This only complicated the matter, forcing the woman and the two children to be taken to the police station.
It was here that the woman was asked to call the children’s mother.
“The police officers asked for the two women’s ID cards and compared the surname. The names matched, hence dismissing the ‘kidnapping ‘allegation,” said a police officer attached at the station.
The incident comes at a time when there has been fears over rising cases of kidnappings in Nairobi.
Just last week, two men were beaten to a pulp in Nairobi’s Zimmerman estate after hey were mistaken for kidnapping a child. The two men had a neighbor’s child in their car. he vehicle was smashed and turned upside down by an angry mob.