Matilda Omonaiye/
A boy who disappeared from his village in Rivers State at the age of 14 has been reunited with his family after spending 18 years in prison without trial, in a case that has prompted questions about how Nigeria’s criminal justice system allowed a child to disappear into detention for nearly two decades.
Gospel Kinanee vanished from his Ogoni community in 2007 after leaving home one evening and never returning.
His family said they searched extensively for him, visiting police stations and making repeated enquiries, but found no trace of him.
The mystery was only unravelled in September 2024 when volunteers from the Haven360 Foundation found a mentally unstable inmate at the Port Harcourt Maximum Correctional Centre during efforts to identify detainees being held unlawfully or without proper documentation.
The man was not recorded as Gospel Kinanee. Instead, prison records identified him as “Baridi Sunday”.
According to the foundation, he had no case file, no record of any trial and had spent years in custody without legal representation.
It was only after volunteers worked to establish his identity that the inmate was confirmed to be the missing teenager whose family had spent nearly two decades searching for him.
His release finally came on July 17, 2025, when the Chief Judge of Rivers State, Justice Simeon Chibuzor Amadi, ordered the discharge of 21 inmates during the Rivers State Jail Delivery Exercise, an initiative designed to reduce prison congestion by freeing detainees who had been held unlawfully or for prolonged periods without trial.
Now 32, Kinanee is slowly rebuilding his life with the support of his family and mental health professionals.
His story, however, has prompted questions that remain unanswered.
There has been no public explanation of how a 14-year-old came to be detained in a maximum security correctional facility, what offence he was alleged to have committed, why he was never brought before a court or why he apparently remained in custody for 18 years without a trial.
Equally unclear is how prison records came to identify him as Baridi Sunday rather than Gospel Kinanee.
Neither the circumstances surrounding the change of identity nor the point at which it occurred has been publicly explained.
His brother has said the family visited police stations repeatedly after Gospel disappeared.
He also said they visited the Port Harcourt correctional centre twice during their search, yet were never told that the missing teenager was being held there.
Those accounts have prompted further questions about record keeping, communication between security and correctional institutions and the processes used to identify detainees.
The police and the Nigerian Correctional Service have yet to publicly explain the circumstances surrounding Kinanee’s arrest, detention or the discrepancy in his identity.
The case has also renewed attention on Nigeria’s longstanding challenge of prolonged pre trial detention, with thousands of inmates across the country awaiting trial, in some cases for years, because of delayed investigations, missing case files, congested courts or the absence of legal representation.
For Kinanee, those systemic shortcomings meant losing his teenage years, his education and much of his adult life behind prison walls.
According to those who found him, his mental health deteriorated significantly during his years in custody, and his rehabilitation is expected to require long term medical and psychological support.
His condition has now become part of legal proceedings arising from the case.
His legal team is reportedly seeking N10 billion in compensation, arguing that his prolonged detention without trial and the circumstances surrounding his imprisonment amounted to serious violations of his constitutional rights.
Whether any official investigation will be opened into the events that led to his detention remains unclear.
Among the issues still awaiting answers are who authorised his detention, why no criminal proceedings were initiated, how his identity came to be recorded differently in official records and why repeated efforts by his family to locate him failed despite their reported visits to police stations and the correctional facility where he was eventually found.
As Kinanee begins the difficult process of rebuilding his life, his extraordinary story has become more than a family reunion. It has become a stark reminder of the human consequences of administrative failures within the criminal justice system and a case likely to intensify calls for greater accountability from the institutions responsible for protecting the rights of those in custody.
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