KANKARA, Nigeria (AP) – Nigeria’s Boko Haram jihadist rebels have released a video allegedly showing some of the more than 300 schoolchildren abducted last week from a government boarding school in the northwestern city of Kankara.
In the more than six-minute video seen by Associated Press reporters, student kidnappers tell a boy to repeat the kidnappers ’demands that the government overturn their troops and planes hunting them.
You can hear a voice telling the boy what to say from behind the camera. The boy speaks clearly under duress. The boy says they were kidnapped by a gang led by Boko Haram factional leader Abubakar Shekau.
He said some of the abductees had been killed. The kidnappers directed the children to demand ransom money. The video circulated widely on WhatsApp and first appeared on a new Nigerian site, HumAngle, which often reports Boko Haram.
Earlier Thursday, one of the schoolchildren who managed to escape explained how he got away from his captors.
Usama Aminu, 17, told The Associated Press about the attack on a school in the northwestern state of Katsina, in which men armed with AK-47 rifles abducted more than 300 students. boys school.
Last Friday was at night when the students heard gunshots, at first thinking they had come from the nearby town. As soon as he and the rest of the students at Kankara Government Science High School realized that there was a raid on the school, they left their dormitory and climbed the school fence to the pandemonium.
But Aminu wasn’t sure yet.
“After climbing the fence, we heard voices that we had to go back,” he said. The boys returned “thinking they were police officers. Unknown to us, they were the bandits. Then they gathered us in one place. That’s when we realized that they were bandits, wearing military uniforms, “he said.
“We walked all night in the bush and at sunrise they found a place and asked us to sit down,” Aminu said.
Aminu, who suffers from sickle cell anemia, recently moved to government government high school of science to be closer to his family and receive medical care for his condition.
In response to the kidnappings, Nigeria launched a rescue operation in which police, the air force and the army tracked down the kidnappers to their hideout in the Zango / Paula forest.
The attack, claimed by Boko Haram, Nigeria’s jihadist rebels, has sparked a cry in the West African nation against the government for not doing enough to stop attacks on northern schools.
“When the bandits heard the sound of the helicopter hovering over us they asked us to lie down under the big trees with our faces on the ground,” Aminu said.
During their walk, Aminu said they met young teenage boys, armed with guns. He said some were younger than him.
Exhausted from the crossing, Aminu grabbed the shoulders of two friends “while the bandits continued to whip people from behind so they could move faster.”
After dark, the boy decided to recite passages from the Qur’an. That was when he managed to escape unnoticed at night and hide in a mosque. A local resident finally found him coughing and offered him a change of clothes so he could leave his school uniform behind, he said.
He returned home around 11pm on Sunday.
His father, Aminu Ma’le, told AP he was relieved but still worried about others. “I can’t celebrate alone because of the other guys who are still missing,” the father said.
Katsina State Governor Aminu Bello Masari said 17 boys had been rescued since the attack, including 15 by the military, another by police and a boy found wandering in the forest who were taken by residents. Aminu was among those boys.
The school has more than 800 students and hundreds of others also managed to escape. But there are still more than 300 detainees by insurgents, who are known to use child soldiers.
According to Garba Shehu, spokesman for Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, the government and the attackers are negotiating the release of the boys. The parents of the missing students meet daily at the school to eagerly await the news of their children.
To prevent any further school abduction, Katsina State closed all its boarding schools. The nearby states of Zamfara, Jigiwa and Kano have also closed schools as a precautionary measure.
Boko Haram has kidnapped schoolchildren because it believes Western education is not Islamic, rebel leader Abubakar Shekau said in a video claiming responsibility for the attack, according to SITE Intelligence Group.
They are likely to have worked with local bandits this year who have carried out increasingly deadly attacks in northwestern Nigeria, according to experts.
Residents of Katsina state are scheduled to protest on Thursday, saying the government is not doing enough to protect its youth.
According to Amnesty International, armed bandits have killed more than 1,100 since the beginning of the year in northwestern Nigeria.
For more than ten years, Boko Haram has been involved in a bloody campaign to introduce a strict Islamic government in northern Nigeria. Thousands of people have been killed and more than a million people have been displaced by violence. Boko Haram has been mostly active in northeastern Nigeria, but with the kidnappings of the Katsina state school, there is concern that the insurgency will spread to the northwest.
The kidnappings of schoolchildren are a frightening reminder of Boko Haram’s previous attacks on schools. In February 2014, 59 boys were killed when jihadists attacked Buni Yadi Federal Government College in Yobe State.
In April 2014, Boko Haram abducted more than 270 schoolgirls from a government boarding school in Chibok, northeastern Borno State. About 100 of these girls are still missing.