Gunmen are holding 300 students hostage in northwest Nigeria. Some people have given up on finding them after two days.
On Sunday, Nigerian security forces continued to search forests and block roads in the northwest of the country to try to find hundreds of kidnapped students. However, observers said it could take weeks to search the vast forests.
At least 100 children younger than 12 years old were taken into a state that is known for killing people violently, not following the law, and dangerous roads where people are often kidnapped.
“We don’t know what to do, but we believe in God,” Hamza told The Associated Press while he was in town.
This was one of the biggest kidnappings of a lot of kids in Nigeria’s northeast in recent months. In a second raid on a school in Sokoto on Saturday, 15 more kids were taken.
This was one of the biggest kidnappings of a lot of kids in Nigeria’s northeast in recent months. In a second raid on a school in Sokoto on Saturday, 15 more kids were taken.
The two mass kidnappings were the most recent in a long line of kidnappings by gunmen targeting schools, colleges, and highways as they looked for big groups of people to hold hostage and demand a ransom. Last week, another raid in northeastern Borno State took more than 200 people. Most of them were women and children who had been forced to leave their homes because of bad weather.
No group has said that they are behind the latest school kidnappings. It was believed that militant jihadists fighting an uprising in the northeast were responsible for the kidnappings in Borno.People in the area claim that farmers fighting with the established communities are to blame for the school kidnappings.The world has been shocked before when a student was taken hostage in Nigeria.
In 2014, Islamic extremists kidnapped more than 200 schoolgirls from Chibok, Borno.The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project told the Associated Press that more than 3,500 people have been kidnapped in Nigeria in the past year.
Kuriga kids who had fled their kidnappers talked about what they went through after being taken from school in a quiet farming village about 60 miles northwest of Kaduna.
Around 8 a.m. on Thursday, dozens of armed men in military uniforms rode into the school grounds on motorbikes, just as the 1,000 students were getting ready for class after singing Nigeria’s national song. Abubakar, 18, a high school student, was one of the kids who were dragged into the bush and hit with horsewhips, but he got away.
Abubakar said, “We walked for hours in the oven-like heat until we were all worn out.” He said that the robbers took the girls away from the boys. “There were more girls than boys,” he clarified. Abdullahi Usman, who is fourteen years old, risked gunshots to get away from his captors.
“Those who didn’t want to move quickly were either put on motorcycles against their will or shot into the air as a threat,” Abdullahi said. He said, “they were yelling, ‘Go! Go! Go!'”
A villager named Lawan Yaro said his dreams were fading because five of his grandchildren were taken. He said that people in the area were used to being unsafe, but “it has never been this way.”
Teacher Nura Ahmad said that the kidnappers showed up on Thursday while students were just getting settled in their classrooms at the government primary and secondary schools. She said that gunmen “came in dozens, riding on bikes and shooting sporadically.” The LEA Primary and Secondary School is one of the few places to learn in this area.
At the town’s entrance, it is away from the road and surrounded by a Westsavannah.Since this happened, my brain has been all over the place,
Eextortion is helping the gangs “further entrench themselves in the north-west,” according to James Barnett, a researcher on west Africa at the Hudson Institute in the US. He told the Associated Press. Guns used in kidnappings are easy to bring into Nigeria because its borders are not well patrolled, according to experts.
Its border with Niger is 1,500 kilometers (932 miles) long, and more than half of that border runs through the northwest. The area is mostly woodland savannah, but there are also huge, uncontrolled woods where organized crime groups hide and hold their kidnapped victims.
“Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project” says that over 3,500 people have been taken from their homes in Nigeria in the past year. Some were taken from their homes in Abuja, the capital, where they lived. When President Bola Tinubu took office last year, he promised to make security tighter and stop kidnappings, which he kept. A bill was passed in 2022 to punish people who pay ransoms, but Nigerian kidnappers are notoriously violent, so many families give in to their requests.