GUSAU, Nigeria (AP) – A Nigerian governor who was abducted from a boarding school in the north-west of the country last week has been released, a state governor said on Tuesday, while the West African nation with a spate of school kidnappings camps have.
The girls, aged ten and older, dressed in light blue hijabs and barefoot, packed into the Zamfara State conference room. They appeared calm and chatted with each other while sitting in long lines while journalists photographed them. They will receive a medical examination before being returned to their parents.
Zamfara government Bello Matawalle said 279 girls were released after being abducted from Government Girls Junior Secondary School in Jangebe City on Friday. The government said last week 317 had been abducted. It was not clear if the higher number was a mistake and if there were still girls missing.
“Alhamdulillah! (God is praised!) It gladdens my heart to announce the abducted students, “Matawalle said in a Twitter post early Tuesday. “I urge all well-meaning Nigerians to be happy with us, because our daughters are safe now.”
Officials said ‘bandits’ were behind the abduction, citing groups of gunmen operating in the state of Zamfara and kidnapping them for money or to release their members from prison.
At the time of the attack, one resident told The Associated Press that the gunmen also attacked a nearby military camp and checkpoint, which prevented soldiers from responding to the school.
One of the girls told the AP the night of their abduction.
“We were sleeping at night when we suddenly started hearing gunshots. They fired endlessly. “We got out of our beds and people told us to run, that they were thieves,” she said. Officials ended the interview before the girl could give her name.
The attackers eventually found her and some classmates and held guns to their heads, she said.
“I was really scared to be shot,” she said, adding that they asked for directions to the staff quarters and the principal. “We said we did not know who she was.”
Nigeria has seen several such attacks and kidnappings in recent years, the most notorious in 2014, when 276 girls were abducted by Boko Haram jihadist rebels from Chibok High School in Borno State. More than 100 of the girls are still missing.
Boko Haram is opposed to Western education and the fighters of schools are often targeted at schools. But most attacks in the Northwest are carried out by armed criminal groups without such an ideology.
Police and the army tried to save the girls from the abduction of Zamfara, which caused international outrage. Officials did not say whether a ransom had been paid for their release.
“We have been in talks with the kidnappers since Friday and agreed on Monday,” the governor said, adding that he would ensure additional safety at all schools in the state.
President Muhammadu Buhari expressed ‘overwhelming joy’ at the release of the girls.
“I join the families and people of the State of Zamfara in welcoming and celebrating the release of these traumatized women students,” he said in a statement. “Being imprisoned is not only a painful experience for the victims, but also for their families and all of us.”
The president has called for greater vigilance to prevent bandits from carrying out such attacks – but warns that paying money for the release of victims will only lead to more assaults.
Ernest Ereke, of the University of Abuja, agrees that ransom allows criminal groups to buy more weapons and expand their power.
And the Nigerian state seems increasingly too weak to respond, he said.
“It’s a lucrative business in a country where a lot of young people are impoverished, unemployed and hungry,” he said. ‘The state, which has to confront these criminals, enables them by always looking at their precepts. It must be the other way around, that is to say the criminals must be afraid of the state, but in this case it is the state that is afraid of criminals. ”
“If the state cannot crush it,” he added, “it means something is wrong with the Nigerian state.”
On Saturday, 24 students, six staff and eight family members were released after being abducted from Government Science College Kagara in the state of Nigeria on February 17. In December, more than 300 schoolboys from a high school in Kankara, in northwestern Nigeria, were taken and later released. The government said no ransom was paid for the release of the students.
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Olukoya reported from Lagos, Nigeria. AP author Carley Petesch in Dakar, Senegal contributed