Nigerian security forces continued to search forests and set up roadblocks in the north-west of the country on Sunday in an attempt to find hundreds of kidnapped schoolchildren, but observers said combing the woodland expanses could take weeks.
More than 280 children aged between seven and 18 were taken from a school in Kuriga on Thursday in one of the biggest mass-abductions in recent months in Nigeria’s turbulent north-west. A further 15 children were taken in another raid on a school in Sokoto on Saturday.
The two abductions were the latest in a series of group kidnappings by gunmen, where criminal gangs target schools, colleges and highways as they hunt for large groups of victims to make ransom demands. More than 200 other people, mostly women and children displaced by conflict, were taken in a separate raid in the north-eastern state Borno last week.
No group has claimed responsibility for the school abductions. Militant jihadists waging an insurgency in the north-east were suspected of carrying out the kidnapping in Borno.
Children who had escaped the kidnappers in Kuriga described their ordeal after being taken from their school in a quiet agrarian village about 60 miles outside the north-west city of Kaduna. At about 8am on Thursday, when the school’s 1,000 students were about to settle into their classes, dozens of armed men in military uniforms rode on motorbikes into the school grounds.
Abubakar, 18, a secondary school pupil, was among the children herded into the forest as they were beaten with horsewhips, but he managed to escape. “We trekked for hours in the scorching heat until we were all exhausted,” Abubakar told AFP. He said the kidnappers separated girls from boys. “There were more girls than boys.”
Lawan Yaro, a villager whose five grandchildren were among those abducted, said his hopes were fading. He said people were used to the region’s insecurity, “but it has never been in this manner”.
More than 3,500 people have been abducted across Nigeria in the last year, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project, cited by Associated Press.
The gangs are “adapting their strategies and further entrenching themselves in the north-west through extortion”, James Barnett, a researcher on west Africa at the US-based Hudson Institute, told the Associated Press.
In April 2014 Boko Haram militants triggered an international outcry by kidnapping more than 250 schoolgirls from Chibok in Borno state. Some of those girls are still missing.
Nigeria’s armed forces are fighting on several fronts, including against armed criminals in the north-west and a longrunning jihadist insurgency in the north-east that has killed 40,000 people and displaced more than 2 million since 2009.
By Angelique Chrisafis |The Guardian UK, Agence France-Presse and Associated Press contributed to this report
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