Unmasking and Mapping Kidnap for Ransom (K4R) in Nigeria’s Crime-Terror Landscape Using Behaviour Sequence Analysis

This study applies Behaviour Sequence Analysis (BSA) to media-reported kidnapping for ransom (K4R) in Nigeria, where publicly available official incident data are scarce. Verified newspaper reports and interviews from 2015 to 2025 yielded 100 cases, coded into behaviours and analysed as lag-one transitions. Standardised residuals identified above-chance transitions, and case-level permutation tests and cluster bootstraps addressed within-incident dependence. Interpreted through a human security lens, the results reconstruct how an abduction unfolds. Perpetrators typically arrive armed, fire weapons to subdue victims, confiscate phones, and force victims face-down before moving them into forested terrain. Abductions cluster in vulnerable locations such as highways, farms, schools, and homes, suggesting opportunism. Most incidents resolve through a negotiated economic exchange of ransom demand, negotiation, payment, and release; a less common lethal pathway runs from shooting to killing to discovery of the body, often where the police first become involved. Policing is largely reactive, running alongside rather than intersecting the negotiations that determine outcomes. The findings identify firearms as the primary tool, locate feasible points of intervention, and, given the cross-sectional design, frame evolving tactics as directions for future, time-structured research.