Usama Aminu, 17 year-previous, a kidnapped college student of the Governing administration Science Secondary College who escaped from bandits is seen during an interview with The Related Push in Kankara, Nigeria, Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2020. The college boy who escaped suggests the learners ended up kidnapped by young, armed adult men in military uniform. Rebels from the Boko Haram extremist group claimed duty Tuesday for abducting hundreds of boys from a university in Nigeria’s northern Katsina Point out final week in one of the largest these kinds of assaults in a long time, elevating fears of a increasing wave of violence in the region. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)
AP
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria
More than 300 schoolboys kidnapped last 7 days by armed adult men in northwestern Nigeria have been introduced, the Katsina state governor reported Thursday.
Gov. Aminu Bello Masari created the announcement on Nigerian point out Television, NTA.
Additional than 800 students were being at the Government Science Secondary College, Kankara, when it was attacked Dec. 11 by armed adult males. Hundreds escaped and it was considered there ended up additional than 330 however captive.
“At the instant, 344 of the college students have been unveiled and handed in excess of to the protection operatives. I feel we can say at minimum we have recovered most of the boys, if not all of them,” he said.
Preparations are currently being created to transport them to Katsina, he claimed.
“The information reaching about an hour in the past indicates that all of them have been recovered and they are on their way from the forest spot to Katsina, Masari explained, incorporating that they would be examined by doctors Friday and then arrangements would be produced to reunite them with their people.
The govt will be “working with the police and also to interact non-public safety firms to safeguard schools” to avert the “ugly expertise of the last 6 days,” he reported.
The authorities experienced explained it was negotiating with the attackers.
News of the launch came shortly just after a video was launched by the jihadist rebels of Boko Haram that purportedly showed the kidnapped boys. Boko Haram claimed responsibility for the abduction.
In the a lot more than six-minute online video observed by Involved Press journalists, the obvious captors explain to a person boy to repeat their requires that the governing administration connect with off its research for them by troops and plane.
A voice can be read telling the boy, who is clearly under duress, what to say from driving the camera. The youth claims they have been kidnapped by a gang directed by Boko Haram factional leader Abubakar Shekau and that some of these abducted from the Federal government Science Secondary School were killed.
The video circulated extensively on WhatsApp and to start with appeared on a Nigerian information internet site, HumAngle, that often reviews on Boko Haram.
Govt officials said police, the air drive and the army tracked the kidnappers to a hideout in the Zango/Paula forest. There has been an outcry in the West African country against the federal government for not executing ample to quit attacks on colleges, as effectively as villages, in the north.
Gurus say the assault was probable carried out by nearby gangs, who have staged progressively fatal assaults in northwest Nigeria this yr, and could possibly have been collaborating with Boko Haram.
Mother and father of the missing learners have been collecting daily at the school in Kankara for news of their sons.
The government initially discovered the attackers as bandits, who are recognized to use boy or girl troopers.
Earlier, Masari reported 17 boys have been rescued considering the fact that the original abduction.
Usama Aminu, a student who was in a position to escape his captors, advised the AP that he listened to gunshots when the attack began. At very first he imagined the pictures arrived from a close by town, but stated that when he recognized it was a raid on the college by guys with AK-47s, he and other folks scrambled from their dormitory and scaled a fence in the pandemonium.
Even nevertheless the 17-year-old fled, he and the other college students even now were being not harmless.
“After we scaled the fence, we ended up hearing voices that we need to appear again,” Aminu mentioned.
The boys returned “thinking they have been police officers. Mysterious to us it was the bandits. They then collected us at a spot. That was when we recognized they were being bandits, carrying army uniform,” he claimed.
“We walked by means of the evening in the bush, and at dawn they found a area and requested us to sit down,” he included.
In the course of their hike, Aminu stated they met other boys in their teens carrying guns. He reported some were being youthful than him.
“When the bandits heard the sound of the helicopter hovering higher than, they asked us to lay down less than the significant trees with our experience to the ground,” reported Aminu, who suffers from sickle cell anemia, a short while ago transferred to the college to be closer to his loved ones and clinical care.
Exhausted from the trek, Aminu held onto the shoulders of two good friends “as the bandits ongoing to flog men and women from the back again so that they can transfer speedier.”
After dark, he decided to recite passages from the Quran. It was then that he managed to slip absent unnoticed and cover in a mosque. A resident at some point discovered him coughing and provided him a change of apparel so that he could go away his school uniform guiding, he stated.
He returned residence about 11 p.m. Sunday.
His father, Aminu Ma’le, informed AP he was relieved but still apprehensive for the other individuals. “I can not rejoice on your own since of the other boys nonetheless lacking,” reported the father.
Katsina state shut down all its boarding schools to stop other abductions. The close by states of Zamfara, Jigiwa and Kano also have shut educational facilities as a precaution.
Armed bandits have killed additional than 1,100 persons given that the commencing of the year in Nigeria’s northwest, according to Amnesty Intercontinental.
For extra than 10 many years, Boko Haram has engaged in a bloody campaign to introduce stringent Islamic rule in Nigeria’s north. Countless numbers have been killed and additional than 1 million have been displaced by the violence.
Boko Haram has been mostly lively in northeast Nigeria, but with the abductions from the school in Katsina condition, there is worry the insurgency is expanding to the northwest.
Friday’s abduction is a chilling reminder of Boko Haram’s attacks on universities. In February 2014, 59 boys had been killed when the jihadists attacked the Federal Authorities University Buni Yadi in Yobe condition.
In April 2014, Boko Haram kidnapped more than 270 schoolgirls from a governing administration boarding university in Chibok in northeastern Borno state. About 100 of all those women are however lacking.
In 2018, Boko Haram Islamic extremists introduced back approximately all of the 110 women they experienced kidnapped from a boarding faculty in Dapchi and warned: “Don’t at any time set your daughters in college yet again.”
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