The military and other security agencies are searching for more than 200 children –some as young as eight–abducted by motorcycle-borne gunmen from their school in Kuriga in northwestern Nigeria’s Kaduna state on Thursday. Some officials said as many as 300 children were missing.
A week earlier, militants kidnapped another 200 people, mostly women and children, from Borno state in the country’s northeast, where the Islamist Boko Haram group is active. The rabid Sunni orthodox group was responsible for the country’s largest mass abduction when it kidnapped 276 schoolgirls from the village of Chibok in 2014. A decade later, many of them are still missing.
Boko Haram, which loosely translated means ‘”Western education is forbidden,” or “Education is Sinful,” is also active in Chad, Niger, northern Cameroon, and Mali. Other militant outfits active in the area include factions of the Daesh or Islamic state and Al Qaeda. All of them are known to kidnap children as sex slaves and soldiers.
“The president directs security and intelligence agencies to immediately rescue the victims and ensure that justice is served against the perpetrators of these abominable acts,” said a statement Friday from President Bola Tinubu, who was elected last year based on his campaign pledge to end the insecurity which has been plaguing the west African country for years.
Apart from criminal gangs which operate in the border areas of the country with impunity and kidnap mostly women and children for ransom, the country also faces communal tension between its large Christian and Muslim populations, with regular clashes between mostly Muslim cattle herders and the farming communities, which are mostly Christian.
On Saturday, local media reported that Uba Sani, the Governor of Kaduna, had denied that his administration had hired a private negotiator to secure the release of the children and their teachers abducted on Thursday.
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