The police in Accra have rescued a 19-year-old girl chained hands and feet, concealed under the metal seats of a 33-seater Mercedes Benz bus and destined for a 723-kilometre journey into forced marriage in Walewale. The girl, Mahad Seidu, a head porter, had endured three hours of the medieval ordeal when luck, in the form of the police, smiled on her on Sunday. What is worse, when men from the Accra Central Detachment of the Motor Traffic and Transport Unit (MTTU) of the Ghana Police Service pulled her from under the metal seats, the man keeping custody of the padlocks securing the young woman to her stakes absconded, requiring hacksaw blades to break the chains. Like the 1979 thriller involving Umaru Dikko, a former Oil Minister of Nigeria, who was bound and caged in a wooden box ready to be flown from London to Lagos but rescued within seconds of the flight by Israeli security operatives, Sunday’s operation at the Tema Station in Accra was equally dramatic. Police sources told the Daily Graphic that six months ago, Mahad had sought refuge in Accra, fleeing the conspiracy of her parents to trade her love for the wealth of a Walewale businessman whose lust had been aroused by her 19-year-old body. But as she laboured for survival in Accra, carrying heavy loads for market women in return for daily bread, Mahad's period of self-imposed exile had a scary interruption when she was kidnapped, chained and squeezed into a suffocating corner under the seat of the Walewale-bound bus, as often done to livestock, ready for the 12-hour journey up north.