Benin police have arrested four Nigerians on suspicion of kidnapping a Lebanese businessman at the weekend, police who freed the hostage said Thursday.
“The four kidnappers arrested on Tuesday are all Nigerians,” Louis-Philippe Houndegnon, commander of the elite police unit that freed the vehicle trader the same day, told AFP.
Abductions, rare in Benin, are frequent in neighbouring Nigeria.
The kidnappers of Lebanese national Abdel-Reda Dhaini, 33, had called from Nigerian phones to demand for ransom.
“Two of them came from Lagos to join two other Nigerians who reside in Cotonou (Benin’s commercial capital), and tailed the Lebanese for a certain period before taking him,” Houndegnon said.
The suspects would appear before a state prosecutor after questioning, he said.
Dhaini, who exports second-hand vehicles, was kidnapped by four men armed with Kalashnikov rifles as he was heading home on Sunday.
The kidnappers demanded 50,000 dollars’ ransom, a police source told AFP. The demand was later lowered to 30,000 dollars.
Police rescued the hostage on Tuesday in the outskirts of Cotonou.
Hundreds of foreigners, especially oil workers, have been kidnapped in Nigeria in the past few years by armed gangs in the southern oil-rich Niger Delta. They have mostly been released unharmed after ransom payments.