A finger tightening on the trigger of the shotgun, I lean out of the car’s window to bring the barrel down on the patch of grass illuminated by a searchlight where my quarry is hiding. I hesitate for a breath.
“Shoot him!” whispers 16-year old Mohammed Ali, son of the man hunter Ali Kwara.
I squeeze the trigger. The explosion is jaw jarring, flame bursts from the barrel. The sharp smell of cordite hits my nose. Grit from the breach is in my mouth, and my ears are whistling.
“You got him” says Ali Kwara in a matter-of-fact way from the driver’s seat. His dog shoots out from the pick up truck and roots around in the bush. I open the passenger door and jump out. One of Ali’s hunters pulls the body from the grass. It is a small rabbit.

For six years Ali Kwara has tracked down armed robbers for the police and state authorities. He uses all the skills he has developed in a lifetime of hunting animals in the bush, from Bauchi to Borno and the Chad border region.
Thanks to a huge network of informants, including many of the armed robbers’ own wives, he has delivered five thousand outlaws to the police.
In six years he has gone from being well known in his home town of Azare, to being famous across the nation. When I asked about Ali Kwara many people said he is a hero, a man who fights against something everyone else fears. Other people said he is a dangerous vigilante who takes the law into his own hands. Sceptics said he must be in league with armed robbers; “How else could he know where they are and how they operate?” they asked.
He has courted the media. He publicly declared an attack on the Benue governor was not a political assassination attempt, as claimed by the governor, and produced a man who confessed to the shooting. When his son was attacked by a group of men bent on revenge, Kwara opened his house to the press.
Many of his supporters said he protects himself with magic. They explain his apparent miraculous courage and continued success to “bullet proof” spells cast on him, perhaps by a powerful marabout. It is a charge Kwara denies: “What I have is from god,” he said.
One thing is certain, there are few people in Nigeria whose lives have not been affected in some way by armed robbery.
Sunday Trust travelled to Azare to meet Kwara and find out more about his methods. After talking with him and his “boys”, Kwara invited us to go hunting with him in the bush.

When we arrive a horde of children are playing happily in his garden, running around the large collection of jeeps parked in the yard. Ali Kwara leads us to a small anteroom of his compound, decorated with the ageing skins of a lion and a zebra. He is a slight looking man with light skin, when we meet he is dressed in a yellow-gold kaftan of expensive quality.
Pointing at the skins on the wall he says: “I am a hunter. I hunted these animals myself when I was very young boy, all the way up near the Chad border.”
He shows me his battered, mud covered sandals. “These are my shoes. You cannot track in anything else, even though the snakes they get you. I was bitten by a snake on my foot last month. I didn’t take any thing for the bite, no injection up to now.” He shows me his foot, and asks me to feel the pair of hard scars.
Ali Kwara is a very wealthy man. The grandson of a Yemeni houseboy brought to Nigeria by a British administrator, Kwara inherited his father’s hide and skin business, building it up until he was making billions of naira every year in turnover, he says.
Ali spent his childhood trekking and hunting in the bush around the North East.
“When you get deep into the bush the animals they don’t know people, and they are not afraid. They come right up to you. I was with my friend tracking we were hunting rabbits and we see a lion. My friend ran away up a tree, but it walked right up to me, I couldn’t run –it was too close. I stood there and it walked up to me. He went like this,” Ali mimes the lion smelling the air. “The lion he shook his head and walked away.” He smiles and his eyes are mischievous. “One day we found a cave and we went in, it was very cool inside out of the hot sun. We walked into the cave and there was something inside –a lion. My friend jumped and he knocked me over. I fell on the lion. It leaped up, hit me here,” touching his jaw, “The lion thought I was attacking him and he pushed past me and ran away.”
It is this familiarity with the bush and his wealth which led the authorities to call on him for help when Bauchi state was terrorised by armed robbers.
“There were thousands of armed robberies, and plenty people were being killed every day,” he says, “We had a former area commander of police who asked me to help. I told him: I am not in the army, I’m not in the Police I can’t help you. But he knew me he knew I was a hunter and I had plenty people to help.”
Kwara spent hundreds of thousands of Naira to clear the bush around the roads. “The robbers heard about me and they started annoying me looking for me trying to kill me. They killed two of my friends. I thought if I leave them something will happen. So every time they came I took my double barrel, my hunting gun. And the police would come and then when the fighting started the police ran away. I stayed and I succeeded.”
Now he gets calls from other northern states begging for help. “I am lucky, when I arrive the armed robbers give up because they are afraid of me,” he says.
When we visit, his house is full of guns; rifles, pistols, shotguns, some antiques, AK-47s, piles of ammunition and clips, all taken from the robbers he has hunted or have come to kill him.
According to Kwara, the armed robbers working in Ghana, Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Chad are a single network of interrelated gangs. Kwara’s secret, the power he has over the armed robbers, is his information. He knows who they are, how they operate and where they like to hide.
A gang, according to Kwara, may be as many as 200 people. The gang may have a limited number of weapons, which it shares among its members. A hundred armed robbers may only have ten guns between them, and they work their trap in shifts. They wait by the road for travellers to fall into their ambush.
After striking the robbers slip into the bush, away from the law. They travel with everything they need; food, guns, women and drink enough to hole up in secret locations where they can get water and lie low.
But even in country as vast as the bush between Plateau and Lake Chad, nothing stays secret for long.
Kwara says: “At the beginning we didn’t know who the armed robbers were, we thought they were all foreigners, so I push my boys into the bush just to see the face of one. When we scatter the robbers we take one and he will mention some names. I have plenty informants all over the country. I send my boys to get a look at one face of the robbers so we know who they are. I used to go myself, I’d dress up as a woman and walk among the robbers to see who they were. Then I’d look for these faces in the cities. When I find them I will send a man to become friends with him. There was one time in Kano they wanted a car, and I gave them mine. They drove my car without knowing.”
He knows where they have to go in the dry season to get water in the vast, flat expanse. He has many Fulani informants who help him locate the gangs. When he locates his quarry he plans how his hunters will track them down and capture them. “I have many tactics, a thousand different ones,” he says.
He reveals one to us; the first three cars in a convoy of six jeeps are filled with expert hunters dressed as women. When they reach the robbers’ hiding place, the hunters in the rear jeeps open fire, drawing the enemy’s attention away from the women.
“Their attention is attracted away from the women, who pull the guns out from under their dresses”, Ali says.
He also reveals: “Sometimes we don’t shoot at them. We fire in the air above them, get them to shoot back and then wait until they are out of ammunition. Then we pick them in hand to hand combat.”
He is not paid by the police for the delivery of any robbers, he says. The entire operation, costing hundreds of millions of Naira every year comes out of his own pocket. This year four governors (Who he won’t name) gave him a “dash” of N20 million each, but it was not enough to last more than five months, Kwara said.
He pays his informants when he can: “I am good to them, give them what they need. But when I have nothing, I give them double next time,” he says.
But there is a more controversial side to Kwara’s operation. After a fight he takes a survivor as a hostage, for information. He takes the young ones, the ones who hid, or ran away from the fight, and he keeps them in his compound.
He says: “The police take most of the robbers, but I take one to my place. I give them a home, help their families, even find wives for them.” He employs a doctor, Dr Hashim Usman, a childhood friend, to attend to them, and pays all the medical bills. Their families come to live with them, and he has even turned matchmaker, finding brides for some of his boys.
But they are not allowed to leave Ali’s home. They provide him with the robber’s secrets, the location of their hideaways and the tactics they use for robbing.
How does he make them tell their secrets? He flicks his wrist over, palm up, fingers splayed. “They are afraid of me,” he says.

Before hunting we met Mohammed Sani, one of the boys he has captive in his compound. As we talked about his boys, Kwara chain-smoked cigarettes, chucking the butts over his shoulder still alight. There are ten boys altogether, all in their twenties or early thirties living with him. They gather around at his feet. Around him they move cautiously crouching down below him. When we spoke to them they looked at him before answering, and clammed up if he looks disapproving.
Kwara says Sani owes him his life: “He was being killed by the army, and I saved him.” What makes this more unusual is Sani’s father was the first man to attack him. After his father was killed Sani went into his father’s business. During an attempt to kill Kwara he was captured.
When he took the boy, Kwara says, the police were intent on killing him. They were raking his car with bullets. Ali Kwara says he went to the car, gunfire all around him, opened the door and took the boy out. “There was glass going everywhere. Plenty in my pockets, even in my hair. I’m lucky they didn’t hit us, they shot at least 1000 rounds into the car.” It is this kind of story that has led people to believe he has magical protection.
Kwara discovered Sani was very popular with a group of armed robber’s wives. After his capture he recruited them as informants for Ali’s network.
He said: “Most of their husbands have been killed by the army, or they have four wives and they are old, not beautiful, and they don’t help them any more. So they need a way of getting money, and I take care of them. Food, house, like my son. What I am doing to this boy I did not do to anyone in my blood.”
In return Sani was recently married, Kwara arranged the wedding and invited the press to show them his generosity to his informants.
Sani is in his mid twenties. He bears the scars of trying to attack the man hunter; a whitened bullet wound on his leg. In Hausa he says: “Two years ago he caught me and brought me here I saw what he is doing is the right thing that’s why I decided to stay. My family is here, he is taking care of them. He used to disturb us and trail us. We fear no other person apart form him. Even if he asked me to leave I will not go.”
Overhearing what he said, Kwara strikes up: “You know why he will not go? I have taken his picture and spread it all over the country. If he leaves I will make calendar of the picture. Everyone will know him and that he is an armed robber. I take him to all the police station. If he is not here he will go back to his old business. Even if a robber stop for ten years, when he run out of money he go back to robbing. Maybe if I die he can go back. I keep them because I’m waiting for the good leader in Nigeria.”
Back in Abuja, Nigeria’s human rights establishment deplores this hostage taking. Emmanuel Onwubiko, a Commissioner at the Nigerian Human Rights Commission says: “What he is doing is absolutely unconstitutional and illegal. It is illegal for a private citizen of Nigeria to establish a quasi detention centre. The constitution says there shall be a police force and no other force. A citizen can help the police with information, but it is illegal and a fundamental breach of human rights to keep someone without a fair hearing in court. The people he has are not armed robbers until a court rules that they are. They are innocent until proven guilty. What he is doing may even amount to cruel and unusual treatment.” He adds that in the south the army and the police are busy fighting armed militias such as MASSOB and the Bakassi Boys. Onwubiko says: “Why should there be one rule for the North and one for the South?”
But Kwara says this is not realistic. He becomes very agitated when he talks about the number of robbers who he has turned over to the police, only for them to be released somewhere between arrest and jail. “These robbers kill policemen to get their guns. Even though they kill policemen, they still get released somewhere.” He claims robbers have returned to kill him hundreds of times.
He says “The system doesn’t work. I cannot stop doing this hunting, of the 5000 armed robbers I have fought, all of them have brothers, blood brothers, perhaps 50 each. They all have people who feed off them, police feed off their release money, governors feed off them.”
He alleges some politicians use the armed robbers to fight their campaigns for them.
A robber Kwara chased into the bush after an unsuccessful attempt to kill him was released by police because he held a letter issued by a northern state saying he was employed as a civil servant “forest manager”. Kwara’s men found him and now he lives in his compound.
When Ali is not around we ask one of his boys how he feels about living with Ali Kwara. He says: “Sometimes I hate him, and I think of killing him. But then I think he is right, and that if I went back to robbing I would not have such a good life. I would be killed by the police.”
Kwara says about the situation he has found himself in: “I am a small business man. I am shouting and no-one is listening”. But Kwara has effectively used the media to spread his legend. “The media are part of my team,” he says. He enjoys being well known: “My phone is always busy. They pray for me everywhere in the church and the mosque. Even now, on the road if I stay for two minutes I have a thousand people around me touching me praying for me. For someone to bless a man is good. In the afterlife Allah will judge the good that a man has done in the world.”
The reason he uses the media, he says, is to “wake Nigeria up”. He says: “I want more people to do what I am doing.”
Why doesn’t he join the police? He says he cannot, for the very reason he became valuable to the law. “I have no education. I missed most of my secondary school because I was in the bush. My teachers never knew me. Even this English I speak I learned it from Europeans who buy the leather.”
He says that the government did not act against the threat of outlaw robbers quick enough. Fighters from the wars in Chad came into Nigeria trained and armed local bandits, making them more ferocious. Politicians, instead of clamping down on them used their strength in their own political battles. It made the robbers stronger.
How many people has he killed? “I have not killed anyone,” he replies, “unless he attacked me. Sometimes they attack me we shoot back. Four of my friends have died!”
Does Ali Kwara ever think about death? “Constantly. Any Muslim considers death all the time. I used to say I wanted to die at someone else’s hand, to put my burden on them for the hereafter. But now I have a family I say I want to die at home with them around me.”

The local police commissioner CP Adanaya Gaya refused to talk about Ali Kwara with us. Bauchi state information commissioner Ibrahim Zailani said: "The constitution has empowered citizens to arrest suspects and hand them over to the police Ali Kwara is just doing that. And I think people are happy with what he does. Ali Kwara is not arresting people arbitrarily; I think is the policewho are with him making the arrests. We're in support with what he does, but the Bauchi state government is not paying him. He is not onour payroll."

Kwara gives me a set of combat fatigues, and a single barrelled shotgun. He changes into a set of grey denims and a small trilby hat. We jump into the jeep with his entourage of hunters and police guards. Riding round the bush on the back of a pick up with Ali at the wheel, I believe I catch a glimpse of why Ali likes to hunt. Each turn of the searchlight into a new thicket is a different possibility. Every twig or branch looks like a pair of ears. A whitened tree branch sticking out of the ground is a gazelle, frozen in flight. My senses are heightened and adrenalin courses through my body.
Ali Kwara drops us at our hotel. The next day we leave for Abuja.
In my time with Ali Kwara I found a man who is as generous as he is dangerous, both cunning and charming. A man with adventure and ruthlessness in his heart, and yet there is one other thing that I remember about our night. Throughout the evening Ali Kwara’s phone rang many times. It is the ring of a romantic, it is the sound of a baby laughing.