Attacks by armed gangs, commonly called bandits, have intensified in northwestern Nigeria in recent years. Four school kidnappings since December have sparked outrage across the country.
Some 39 students, including a pregnant woman, are still missing from Thursday’s kidnapping of the Federal College of Forest Mechanization in northwestern Nigeria.
Samuel Aruwan, Kaduna’s state commissioner for internal security and internal affairs, said police, the army and others had repelled the attacks on another school and at a local government office near Kaduna airport.
“The Kaduna state government extends its unequivocal solidarity to the military, police, state services department and other security agencies, whose swift intervention prevented the bandits from kidnapping more people,” Aruwan said.
Aruwan added that 307 students from the government secondary school in Ikara were counted, and added that the army and air force also repelled an attack on high-level personnel in the village of Ikara. Ifira in the local government area of Igabi.
In that video, a college student said his captors wanted a 500 million naire ($ 1.3 million) ransom.
“As a government, our focus is to recover our missing students and prevent new episodes of school kidnappings,” Aruwan said.
President Muhammadu Buhari, who spoke in a video message posted on Twitter on Sunday, ordered states to address security issues at all levels and said military service chiefs would quickly address broader security issues.
“We will be very tough on criminals,” he said, adding that “confidence in governance must be restored in the next six weeks.”