The yet-to-be-identified soldier alleged shot the driver, Abba Saminu, for refusing to offer him N500 bribe at a check-point close to Mararrabar Jos town around 11pm on Sunday.
As the news of the shooting spread, trailer drivers protested by blocking the Kaduna- Zaria Expressway with their vehicles.
Narrating the incident from his hospital bed at St Gerald’s Hospital, Kaduna, the victim said he was on his way back to Kaduna with Irish potatoes inside the vehicle when he came across a check-point mounted by the soldiers around 10pm on Sunday.
He said: “They ordered us to park. As I was about parking by the roadside, one of the soldiers demanded N500 from me. I told him I could only afford N100.
So he shouted at us and ordered us out of the vehicle.” Abba added that immediately he alighted from the vehicle another soldier slapped him.
He said: “When I turned to run, I heard a gunshot and I fell down. The soldiers entered their vehicle and zoomed off.
Some people later picked me in my pool of blood and rushed me to the hospital.” At the hospital, Abba’s employer, who gave his name as Alhaji Ibrahim, appealed to the military and the government to end harassment of drivers by soldiers.
The state Secretary, National Association of Road Transport Owners (NARTO), Alhaji Babangida Mohammed, also appealed to his fellow drivers not to always resort to blocking the highway whenever they have a dispute with the authorities.
According to him, innocent travelers always suffer as a result of such actions.
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