Daniel Bior may not have suspected that men gently clad in army uniforms would be his first enemy after walking out of his school compound. But he now knows that not anything that glitters is gold.

Mr Bior, 20, was in a group of five students from Promised Land Secondary School when they met these men in uniform at Shirkat suburb, just a few meters away from their school compound.

“We wanted to cross to come to school. That guy came and asked us, ‘which school is this?’” he recalls in a media testimony before the police.

“We told him ‘this school is called Promised Land.’ Then the guy asked us again, ‘who promised you this land?’” Mr Bior recounted.

“We said ‘we are just students; our director is there, if you want to know more about the school, go to him’.”

The man wielded an AK47 machine gun. He cocked it and threatened to shoot the students ‘if they don’t talk well’.

Before he could fire, his colleague in arms joined him.

“They told us, ‘follow us; if you don’t follow us, we will shoot you’,” Mr Bior said.

So the defenseless students complied and followed them, into a Noah car parked nearby, and the men drove off into a certain place they call “home.”

“They caned us seriously. And then, from inside there, they blindfolded us and put us in their car. They took us to the River Nile,” Mr Bior narrated.

“They threw us into the river. We were swimming as they were shooting us,” he said.

“Then I escaped under grasses, I hid myself there. Around 4 O’clock is when I came out and went home.”

Mr Bior, and three others managed to escape under these circumstances on this bitter Wednesday, but the fate of the two others is not known.

They might have been shot and died in the water. Or they felt prey to hungry crocodiles and other fierce aquatic animals in the River Nile. One family has gone ahead to consider their son dead.

Police at a post along the Nesitu road say they heard the gunfire that day and raced to the scene.

“They came from Juba in Black Noah CE 554K,” said Major Kong Akong Kiir, the officer in charge of the post along the Nesitu road, referring to the car the attackers used.

“They took the children to the riverside and this was followed by gunfire,” he said.

Maj Kong said eight people were arrested in connection with the incident, four of which are suspects while four others would help with the investigations.

One of them is a wife to a suspect who is still on the run.

“They have been staying in Rajaf since they deserted the army……,” the wife said, in a statement to the police.

“These people appear in uniform, but nobody knows where they receive salaries,” the police said.

The unnamed woman said she learned her husband had captured the children when she returned from a clinic.

“I don’t know whether the children died or what. I heard people had run away because of the gunfire,” she told the police.

Residents say this incident is among several others in which men in uniform gag civilians and hack them to death.

One resident who didn’t want to be named for security reasons said body of a woman was found last week rotting in a makeshift house. Her head was cut off and placed next to the corpse.

In another incident in the same suburb more than a week ago, armed men signaled a taxi car to stop. They called out a certain name and the driver responded, ‘yes’. They then asked one man to alight.

As he came close to the exit, the men shot him dead and left. Residents link the incidents to the same gang, which police say ran to the direction of ‘Rajaf’.

The governor of Jubek State, Augustino Jaddalla, has formed a 10-man committee headed by his security advisor, Peter Jerkis Jaden, to investigate the killings in Rajaf East.

They are mandated to find out within seven days the root causes.

“According to civilians, they said those who came were soldiers because they were using a military vehicle and wearing army uniform, and they were carrying guns,” said Sala Rajab, the state information minister.

“…the armed men took around 9 to 11 people from the area. They took youth, a chief and a woman called Mary with her small kid,” Mr Salah said.

The woman was beaten before she was kidnapped.

“If those people are from our military units, we order the police and all the security forces to work on this matter and hand them over to the police to investigate this matter,” he added.