The 287 students kidnapped on the 7th after an attack by armed individuals against a school in the state of Kaduna, in north-central Nigeria, have been released, the state governor, Uba Sani, reported this Sunday.
“I wish to announce that our children from Kuriga school have been released,” Sani said in a statement.
The attack occurred early on the morning of March 7 at the Local Education Authority primary school in Kuriga town, a dusty town in the northwestern state of Kaduna, when about a hundred attackers stormed the school. It was the first mass kidnapping in Africa’s most populous nation since 2021, when more than 150 students were kidnapped from a secondary school also in Kaduna.
A security source said the students were rescued in a forest in neighboring Zamfara state and were being escorted by the army to the capital of Kaduna to undergo medical tests before being reunited with their families.
The Kaduna governor expressed his “special gratitude” to Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu for “prioritizing the safety of Nigerians and in particular for ensuring that the kidnapped Kuriga schoolchildren were released unharmed.”
“The Nigerian Army also deserves special praise for demonstrating that with courage, determination and commitment we can degrade criminal elements and restore security in our communities,” the governor added, without clarifying how the children were released or whether they were paid. a rescue.
The kidnappers asked the families for a ransom of one billion naira (about 567,000 euros) to free the students and some teachers, two local civil society leaders confirmed to EFE on the 13th.
Speaking to the press that same day in the country’s capital, Abuja, the Nigerian Minister of Information, Mohammed Idris, said that Tinubu had ordered that the Government “not pay any ransom to any of these criminal elements.”
Some states in Nigeria – especially in the center and northwest of the country – suffer incessant attacks by “bandits”, a term used in the country to name criminal gangs that commit mass assaults and kidnappings to demand large ransoms and whose members the authorities sometimes called “terrorists.”
The attacks are repeated despite repeated promises to end the violence by the Nigerian Government, which has reinforced the deployment of security forces.
Added to this insecurity is that caused since 2009 by the activity of the jihadist group Boko Haram in the northeast of the country and, as of 2016, also by its split, the Islamic State in the West Africa Province (ISWAP, for its acronym in English). English). The tactic has since been widely adopted by ideologically unaffiliated criminal gangs.
