Nigeria’s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on Friday sent troops to rescue more than 250 pupils kidnapped by gunmen from a school in the country’s northwest in one of the largest mass abductions in three years.
The Kaduna state attack was the second mass kidnapping in a week in Africa’s most populous state, where heavily armed criminal gangs on motorbikes target victims in villages and schools and along highways in the hunt for ransom payments.
Local government officials in Kaduna State confirmed the kidnapping attack on Kuriga school on Thursday, but they have still not given figures as they said they were still working out how many children had been abducted.
At least one person was shot dead during the attack, local residents said.
Sani Abdullahi, a teacher at the GSS Kuriga school in Chikun district, said staff managed to escape with many students when the gunmen known locally as bandits attacked early Thursday firing in the air.
He told local officials 187 pupils had been snatched from the main junior school along with another 100 from the primary classes. Three local residents also said between 200 and 280 children and teachers had been snatched.
“Early in the morning… we heard gunshots from bandits, before we knew it they had gathered up the children,” local resident Musa Mohammed told AFP.
“We are pleading to the government, all of us are pleading, they should please help us with security.”
The Kaduna abduction and the mass kidnapping a week ago from camps for people displaced by jihadists in northeast Borno state illustrate the challenge facing Tinubu who promised to make Nigeria safer and bring in more foreign investment.
“I have received briefing from security chiefs on the two incidents, and I am confident that the victims will be rescued,” Tinubu said in a statement ordering armed forces to track down the kidnappers.
“Nothing else is acceptable to me and the waiting family members of these abducted citizens. Justice will be decisively administered.”
The two mass kidnappings also came almost ten years after Boko Haram jihadists triggered huge international outcry in April 2014 by kidnapping more than 250 schoolgirls from Chibok in Borno state.
Some of those girls are still missing.
More than 100 people are reported missing after militants carried out the mass kidnapping last week targeting women and children in camps for those displaced by the jihadist conflict in Borno. But conflicting accounts have emerged about the time and number of victims.
payments after weeks or months spent in captivity at bandit camps hidden in the forests that stretch across northwestern states.
UN child welfare agency UNICEF also condemned Thursday’s attack and called on the government to do more to protect students.
“Schools are supposed to be sanctuaries of learning and growth, not sites of fear and violence,” UNICEF Nigeria director Christian Munduate said in a statement.
Nigeria’s armed forces are battling on several fronts, including against armed criminals in the northwest and the long-running jihadist insurgency in the northeast that has killed 40,000 and displaced more than 2 million since 2009.
France24
