Amazing grace | 18 January 2018

Last week, Peregbakumo Oyawerikumo, aka ‘The Master’, was finally caught and shot by the Nigerian army. Oyawerikumo and his Egbesu Boys had styled themselves as local Robin Hoods, taking riches from oil companies in the Niger Delta, but they won’t be much missed. In the remote swamp town of Enekorogha, their demise will be celebrated, because this was the scene of their most notorious crime.

It was here, last October, that the Egbesu Boys kidnapped Ian Squire, an optician from Surrey who was working at a clinic, and three fellow Britons: Cambridgeshire GP David Donovan and his wife Shirley, and optometrist Alanna Carson, from Northern Ireland.

On their first day in captivity, the Master’s men unexpectedly handed Mr Squire the acoustic guitar they had taken from his lodgings. Squire played ‘Amazing Grace’, which cheered his co-hostages, but apparently rattled one of the more trigger-happy gunmen, who fired in the group’s direction as a warning to quieten down. Mr Squire, 57, was hit and killed.

So ended the life of a man who had brought both courage and innovation to his charity work. Mr Squire had invented a solar-powered lens-grinding machine so that his eye clinic could make spectacles on the spot — a Vision Express for the developing world. It used glasses donated from lost property at Heathrow airport, not far from his high-street practice in the commuter town of Shepperton.

Squire and co. however, had not come to the lawless Delta region on behalf of some frontline aid agency such as Médecins Sans Frontières. Instead, they were foot soldiers of a less fashionable and largely forgotten wing of aid work — Christian missionaries.

I met the Donovans at their Cambridgeshire home late last year, not long after their release from their 22-day ordeal.