FG orders troops to rescue kidnapped Kaduna students
Sopuruchi Onwuka
The federal government has ordered immediate release of hundreds of school children abducted by mainly foreign ransom seeking bandits operating in the country.
The mass rallying of school children in Kaduna marks the largest security affront by the bandits on the new administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu led federal government.
Following a spate of public outrage over the ease with which Sahel bandits pillage villages in the country, abducting and raping women for ransom and establishing crime enterprises in many villages in the nation; President Tinubu on Friday ordered men of the armed forces to move in and rescue the pupils some of whom are said to be as young as eight years of age.
The bandits are reported to have arrived the Kuriga school in Kaduna State on Thursday, killing a local man trying to stop them and then taking as many as more than 300 pupils some of them who escaped before they were moved.
Sani Abdullahi, a teacher at the GSS Kuriga school in Chikun district, said staff managed to escape with many students when the gunmen known locally as bandits attacked early Thursday firing in the air.
He told local officials 187 pupils had been snatched from the main junior school along with another 100 from the primary classes.
The Kaduna abduction and the mass kidnapping a week ago from a camp for people displaced by jihadists in northeast Borno illustrate the challenge facing Tinubu who promised to make Nigeria safer and bring in more foreign investment.
“I have received briefing from security chiefs on the two incidents, and I am confident that the victims will be rescued,” Tinubu said in a statement ordering armed forces to track down the kidnappers.
“Nothing else is acceptable to me and the waiting family members of these abducted citizens. Justice will be decisively administered.”
The two mass kidnappings also came almost ten years after Boko Haram jihadists triggered huge international outcry by kidnapping more than 250 schoolgirls from Chibok in Borno state.
More than 100 people are reported missing after militants carried out a mass kidnapping last week targeting women and children in camps for those displaced by the jihadist conflict in Borno.
“As of this moment we have not been able to know the number of children or students that have been kidnapped,” Kaduna State Governor Uba Sani told reporters in Kuriga on Thursday. “No child will be left behind.”
Hundreds of schoolchildren and college students have been kidnapped in mass abductions in the northwest and central region, including in Kaduna, in the last three years.
Almost all were released for ransom payments after weeks or months spent in captivity at camps hidden in forests that stretch across northwestern states.
Nigeria’s armed forces are battling on several fronts, including against armed criminals in the northwest and the long-running jihadist insurgency in the northeast that has killed 40,000 and displaced more than two million since 2009.
Fighting in Borno has eased as militants have been pushed back from the territory they once controlled, but they still carry out attacks and raids in remote areas.
Last September, gunmen abducted more than 30 people, including 24 female students, in a raid around a university in northwest Zamfara State.
In February 2021, bandits raided a girls’ boarding school in the town of Jangebe in Zamfara, kidnapping around 300 students. Months earlier, gunmen snatched more than 300 students from a boys school in Kankara in Katsina state before releasing them days later.
Between July 2022 and June 2023, 3,620 people were abducted in 582 kidnap-related incidents in Nigeria, according to local risk analysts SBM Intelligence. In January, SBM said 3,964 people had been abducted since Tinubu took office in May last year.
