KANKARA, Nigeria (AP) – Nigeria’s freed schoolboys have reunited with their joyful mother and father just after getting held captive for almost a week by gunmen allied with jihadist rebels in the country’s northwest.
Relieved parents hugged their sons tightly on Saturday in Kankara, wherever additional than 340 boys have been kidnapped from the Authorities Science Secondary University on the evening of Dec. 11. Other family members satisfied their sons in Ketare, about 25 kilometers (15 miles) absent. Far more boys went to their homes even further away in Katsina state.
“When I read our boys ended up freed, I was comprehensive with pleasure and pleasure because I could not snooze, I could not consume,” Murjanatu Rabiu, a mother of 1 of the boys, claimed.
“We were crying, not recognizing the situation that they had been in,” she explained. “When we noticed them, we had been so joyful even nevertheless they came back with wounds … and extremely hungry.”
Amid the celebrations, however, numerous of the schoolboys expressed be concerned about returning to faculty, indicating their captors threatened them with demise if they went back again to classes. Nigeria’s Boko Haram jihadist rebels claimed accountability for the abductions, saying they attacked the university since they feel Western schooling is un-Islamic.
“Fear gripped me when they stated if they at any time see us in college again, that they will get rid of us,” reported freed Kankara university student, Usman Mohammad Rabiu. “I was critically concerned.”
The 13-calendar year-aged boy advised how the pupils were being pressured at gunpoint to trek a number of miles via the bush, without the need of food stuff or h2o. His feet had sores from the hike across the rough terrain. He explained his ft had been so distressing that he couldn’t stroll and he was helped by an older boy who carried him on his back. He mentioned he does not want to go back to university.
“The purpose why I’ll not go back to school is simply because I am imagining if I go again to faculty the bandits will get rid of me and then I’ll not see my mom and dad yet again,” claimed Usman. “That’s the motive why I will not go again all over again.”
Immediately after currently being unveiled by their captors, the schoolboys had been bused to Katsina, the provincial capital, where by they achieved with Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari on Friday. The president appeared to limit the traumatic abduction, telling the boys they must not be deterred in life by “this small problem.”
Another abduction of far more than 80 college students occurred Saturday night in an region nearby, but the pupils were being promptly rescued by protection forces just after a intense gun battle, law enforcement announced Sunday.
Saturday night’s tried kidnapping took place in Dandume, about 64 kilometers (40 miles) from Kankara, the city where the previously kidnapping of schoolboys happened.
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