KADUNA, Nigeria: Rescue business kidnapping is booming in northern Nigeria and schoolchildren are its hottest product.
Just before midnight on March 11, gunmen entered a school about 300 meters from a military training university in Kaduna State and seized dozens of students from their dormitories. . The catchers took less than 12 hours to issue an already familiar lawsuit, via a large video posted on Facebook.
“They want 500 million Naira,” said one of the terrified hostages of the Federal College of Forestry, sitting shirtless in a clearing in the forest, a sum equivalent to about a million dollars. The masked men wearing Kalashnikovs walked among the 39 students — mostly young women — and began beating them with bowls.
“Our lives are in danger,” one woman shouted. “Just give them what they want.”
On March 13, the Nigerian army thwarted an attempt to kidnap 300 more students at a boarding school less than 50 miles away. The next day, the children were part of a group of eleven people abducted from the city of Suleja, in the Nigerian state of Nigeria.