by Ahmed Kingimi
MAIDUGURI, NIGERIA (Reuters) – Students and staff at a school in northern Nigeria kidnapped earlier this month by gunmen have been released unharmed, the Nigerian army said on Sunday.
The kidnapping of 287 students on March 7 in Kuriga marked the first mass kidnapping in the country since 2021, when more than 150 students were kidnapped from a high school in Kaduna.
Nigerian army spokesman Major General Edward Buba said 137 hostages – 76 women and 61 men – were freed early Sunday in neighboring Zamfara state.
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“In the early hours of March 24, 2024, the military, working with local authorities and government agencies across the country in a coordinated search and rescue operation, rescued the hostages,” Edward said Buba in a press release.
A security source earlier said the students were rescued from a forest and were being escorted to the capital of Kaduna to undergo medical examinations before being reunited with their families.
The contours of the rescue operation were not immediately clear.
The governor of the Kaduna region, Uba Sani, had earlier indicated that nearly 200 hostages had been released.
Mass kidnappings are common in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country. They were first carried out by the jihadist group Boko Haram, which kidnapped 276 students from a girls’ school in Chibok, in Borno state, in the northeast of the country, ten years ago. Some of them were never released.
Since then, this tactic has been widely adopted by criminal gangs with no ideological affiliation.
The armed men who kidnapped the students in Kuriga had demanded the payment of a ransom of one billion naira (637,400 euros) but the government had ruled out this practice, banned since 2022.
(Reporting Ahmed Kingimi in Maiduguri, written by MacDonald Dzirutwe, Blandine Hénault for the French version)
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