OWN CORRESPONDENT, Washington | Saturday
US officials and authorities in the states of Ohio and Kentucky have mounted a massive search for a Cameroonian teenager who mysteriously disappeared last week near the end of a bizarre odyssey to be reunited with his mother.
“We have no idea whatsoever where he is or what happened to him, we just can’t figure it out,” said Ted Bushelman, a spokesman for the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport, where 16-year-old Oumar Nkeng was last seen on December 18.
Bushelman and US State Department officials helping Nkeng get to his mother in Memphis, Tennessee, said the boy – who has lived for the past eight years in the West African nation and speaks only broken English – could be anywhere.
Nkeng vanished on the last leg of an unusual journey that began last month when he appeared at the US embassy in Cameroon’s capital of Yaounde claiming to have been abducted from the United States by his Cameroonian father 10 years ago, the official said.
The teenager told embassy officials his father had died in 1998 and that he no longer wanted to live with the neighbors who had taken him in and instead wanted to be with his American mother, Jacquelyn Ennis.
“We were able to verify his story, tracked down the mother who had moved repeatedly and is now living in Memphis, issued a passport for the kid and put him on a plane home,” the official said.
Nkeng traveled from Yaounde to Paris on an Air France flight, accompanied by a US government employee, and was then turned over to Delta Airlines for the trip back to the United States.
Carrying a letter from the embassy explaining his circumstances, Nkeng arrived in Cincinnati safely last Monday but his connecting flight to Memphis was cancelled due to snow.
Delta then booked Nkeng on a Memphis-bound flight early the next day and arranged for a hotel room for him. Nkeng left the hotel and boarded a shuttle bus to the airport but never turned up for the new flight and has been missing since. – AFP
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