Nigerian military rescues 344 kidnapped schoolboys

Dec. 17 (UPI) — Much more than 300 schoolboys who ended up kidnapped in northern Nigeria had been rescued on Thursday, condition officials said.

The Nigerian navy rescued 344 of the boys who were kidnapped in the course of an assault on the Federal government Science Secondary School Kankara in Katsina point out final week, according to Abdu Labaran, a spokesman for Katsina Gov. Aminu Bello Masari.

Masari instructed CNN that youngsters in a online video produced previously Thursday that involved the logo of the Boko Haram militant group ended up the very same college students who have been kidnapped.

A massive team of men armed with AK-47s confused stability at the faculty before marching a lot more than 300 learners into the forest.

Boko Haram has earlier attacked people in the northeastern portion of Nigeria and experts say the kidnapping marks a important distribute for the militant business.

Masari, on the other hand, denied that Boko Haram was associated in the kidnappings, instead blaming them on “area bandits.” Masari also suggested that a voice in the online video boasting to be Abubakar Shekau, a chief of one of Boko Haram’s factions, was actually a bandit “mimicking” his voice.

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari welcomed the launch of the kids and explained their harmless return as “a large reduction to their people, the overall place and international group,” spokesman Garba Shenu wrote on Twitter.

The country has confronted a rise in kidnappings, with 1 of the most noteworthy involving 270 girls from a college in Chibok in 2014 by Boko Haram’s Shekau faction. Even though the Nigerian army rescued 80 of people women, a lot more than 100 hardly ever returned house.

Buhari on Thursday acknowledged that his administration was elected to deliver an stop to the kidnappings.

“When we came, we manufactured initiatives that yielded the return of the Chibok Girls. When a equivalent incident of faculty abduction happened at Dapchi, we efficiently returned all but just one of the far more than 100 abductees,” he mentioned. “When this most recent incident took place, we place in our attempts and nowadays we have this end result to clearly show.”