Parents wait for news about the kidnapped LEA Primary and Secondary School Kuriga students in Kuriga, Kaduna, Nigeria on March 9, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

Nearly 300 kidnapped Nigerian schoolchildren were released on March 24, local officials said on March 24, more than two weeks after the children were seized from their school in the northwestern State of Kaduna.

Kaduna State Gov. Uba Sani did not give details of the release of the 287 students, who abducted from their school in the remote town of Kuriga on March 7. In a statement, he thanked Nigerian President Bola Tinubu “particularly ensuring that the abducted Kuriga school children are released unharmed”.

Mr. Tinubu had vowed to rescue the children “without paying a dime” as ransom.

Abductions of students from schools in northern Nigeria are common and have been a major source of concern since 2014, when Islamic extremists kidnapped over 200 schoolgirls in Borno state’s Chibok village.

In recent years, abductions have been concentrated in the country’s northwestern and central regions, where dozens of armed groups often target villagers and travellers for ransom.

The raid on the village in Kaduna States in Nigeria came weeks after around 280 students were abducted from a school in the State.
| Photo Credit: AP

Waking up to a gunman shining a light around his house, Nigerian Yusuf Thomas took his chance to escape when his would-be kidnapper told him to lie still and walked away to make a call.

He was lucky. More than 80 residents from his village in northwest Nigeria’s Kaduna State were snatched after gunmen marched them out of their homes on Sunday evening in the country’s most recent mass abduction for ransom.

The raid on the village in Kajuru district came just weeks after around 280 pupils were abducted from a school by a criminal gang in the same State, prompting a national outcry about Nigeria’s insecurity.

Mr. Thomas thought he would be shot until he managed to escape. “I heard a voice telling me not to raise my head or I’d be shot, so I laid down,” he said.

“When he turned back and was making a call to his colleagues, I used the opportunity to escape.”

Kaduna is one of the northwestern Nigerian States where heavily armed criminal gangs target villages and communities to raid, loot and carry out mass abductions for ransom.

State officials have not given any figures for the kidnapping, but local officials say 87 people, mostly women and children, were taken.