Gunmen abducted 317 girls from a boarding school in northwestern Nigeria, police said in a statement on Friday, the latest in a rising tide of high school kidnappings in Africa’s most populous nation, where kidnapping to rescue has become a lucrative industry.
Armed militants stormed the government girls’ high school in Jangebe, Zamfara state, around 1 a.m. Friday and packed schoolgirls into vehicles or drove them to the nearby Rugu forest. , which stretches over three states and hundreds of miles. In the morning, community leaders were still working to calculate the number of missing people.
Ahmad Abdullahi, a father, said his daughter had escaped, but that five of his nieces, aged 14 to 17, were among the missing people.
The news marks the second kidnapping of this kind in just over a week in northwestern Nigeria, where increased armed militancy has led to a deterioration in security.
Dozens of schoolchildren and staff are still missing after being abducted at another school, on February 17, the Kagara Government College of Science in Niger State, according to government officials who are negotiating with the kidnappers to take the victims home.
An armored transporter parked at Government Science College in Kagara after gunmen abducted dozens of students and staff earlier this month.
Photo:
kola sulaimon / Agence France-Presse / Getty Images
There were no immediate comments from the federal government or any liability claims. Analysts said the culprits were probably one of the groups of heavily armed bandits who have become increasingly powerful in the northwestern strips of Nigeria, not the jihadist groups based in the northeast.
“Rescue kidnapping is now Nigeria’s most prosperous industry,” said Bulama Bukarti, a terrorism analyst and columnist for the Daily Trust, the most popular newspaper in northern Nigeria.
Nigerian officials are divided between those who favor dialogue with criminal groups who confiscate schoolchildren and those who favor a zero-tolerance approach.
More than 300 schoolchildren were received by government officials in Nigeria after being released by their captors. The Boko Haram jihadist group had claimed responsibility for the kidnapping. (Originally published on December 18, 2020)
President Muhammadu Buhari has quietly rejected his claim that the country’s uprisings are technically defeated and has acknowledged that the nation is in a “state of emergency”. The country, which has one of the strongest armies in Africa and is a strong anti-terrorist ally of the United States, is struggling to contain multiple threats: a ten-year jihadist rebellion and inflatable banditry and illegality. they have transformed into a conflict of overlapping militant groups.
After months of criticism for rising insecurity in all northern states, Buhari reluctantly agreed to reorganize its military leaders in January.
Shehu Sani, a former senator who studied in the city of Kagara as a child, said the groups were targeting children because they gave the highest ransom payment.
“We’re stuck in the most vicious cycle,” he said. “We need help to acquire new technologies to overcome it and to find the children that these people have taken.”
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