KANO, Nigeria — Gunmen took more than 300 women in a nighttime raid on a school in northwest Nigeria on Friday and are thought to be holding a few of them in a forest, cops stated.
It was the 2nd such kidnapping in little over a week in an area significantly targeted by militants and criminal gangs. There was no instant claim of duty.
Police in Zamfara state said they had actually started search-and-rescue operations with the army to discover the “armed bandits” who took the 317 women from the Government Girls Science Secondary School in the town of Jangebe.
“There’s information that they were moved to a neighbouring forest, and we are tracing and exercising caution and care,” Zamfara cops commissioner Abutu Yaro informed a press conference.
He did not state whether those potentially transferred to the forest consisted of all of them.
Zamfara’s details commissioner, Sulaiman Tanau Anka, informed Reuters the aggressors stormed in shooting sporadically throughout the 1 a.m. raid.
“Information available to me said they came with vehicles and moved the students, they also moved some on foot,” he stated.
School kidnappings were very first performed by jihadist groups Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province however the technique has actually now been embraced by other militants in the northwest whose program is uncertain.
They have actually ended up being endemic around the significantly lawless north, to the distress of households and aggravation of Nigeria’s federal government and militaries. Friday’s was the 3rd such event considering that December.
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The increase in kidnappings is sustained in part by considerable federal government rewards in exchange for kid captives, catalysing a more comprehensive breakdown of security in the north, authorities have actually stated, speaking on condition of privacy.
The federal government rejects making such payments.
Parents had no faith in authorities to return their abducted women, stated Mohammed Usman Jangebe, the dad of one abductee, by phone.
“We are going to rescue our children, since the government isn’t ready to give them protection,” he stated.
“All of us that have had our children abducted have agreed to follow them into to the forest. We will not listen to anyone now until we rescue our children,” he included.
