Nigeria announces release of more than 300 students kidnapped by Boko Haram

One of the children kidnapped by Boko Haram in northwestern Nigeria, according to the video released this Thursday by the jihadist group Illustrated Service (Automatic) / Europa Press

The Nigerian authorities have assured this Thursday that the more than 300 children kidnapped last week by the jihadist group Boko Haram in a school located in the northwest of the country have been released.

The announcement was made by the governor of the state of Katsina, Aminu Bello Masari, who added in statements to the BBC that the 344 young people rescued are in good health.

Bello Masari added that none of the students have been killed by the captors.

Shortly after, a presidential spokesman, Bashir Ahmad, confirmed the release on his Twitter account.

However, a source close to the investigation assured the agency France Presse that there were still some students in the hands of the jihadists.

"The young people have been abandoned in the middle of the forest after the kidnappers have received the required reward," said a source who lowered the condition of anonymity to France Presse.

Hours before the announcement of the release, the terrorist group had released a video in which a child appeared claiming that he was "one of the 520 children" kidnapped by the group led by Abubaker Shekau.

Boko Haram, which has been the protagonist of one of the bloodiest terrorist insurgencies in Africa since 2009, the year in which Abubakar Shekau assumes command of the organization, has shown special activity in recent weeks, as it is responsible for the massacre of more than a hundred of agricultural workers in Maiduguri, some of them beheaded, in Borno State, at the end of November, and of an attack near Diffa, in neighboring Niger, where 28 people were killed, most of them burned alive.

In the last 11 years, Boko Haram and its Islamic State of West Africa split, as well as the military response to combat them, have caused some 36,000 deaths and two million displaced, affecting Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Chad.

Boko Haram was also the terrorist group responsible for the kidnapping of the 276 girls from Chibok, which bears enormous similarities to this one from Katsina.

It happened in 2014 and the whereabouts of 112 of the young women are still unknown.