Nigerian kidnapped students return home

Some of the Nigerian students who have been kidnapped for six days walk in a file towards a government building after being released, this Friday in the town of Katsina. Sunday Alamba / AP

Looking tired, barefoot, with dusty face and clothes, but happy.

Some dressed in khaki shirts and green school pants, others bundled up in gray blankets.

This is how the 344 students freed the previous day in northern Nigeria after a six-day kidnapping arrived in the city of Katsina on buses.

The authorities assure that they do not know if other adolescents are still in the hands of their captors and there are doubts about the authorship of the kidnapping: the terrorist group Boko Haram assumed the facts the day after the abduction, but the governor of the state of Katsina, Aminu Bello Masari , insists that they were simply "bandits."

The 344 boys were transferred to a government building in Katsina and later reunited with their parents elsewhere in the city.

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari expressed his satisfaction through his Twitter account: “This is a great relief to the entire country and the international community.

The whole country is grateful to Governor Masari, the intelligence agencies, the Army and the police ”.

The authorities deny having paid any ransom and assure that the release has been possible thanks to a negotiation process that they have not detailed.

One of the boys, who did not identify himself, told Nigerian television Arise that their captors regularly beat them with sticks and that they claimed to be members of Boko Haram, although he suspects that they were mere bandits.

“They beat us in the morning and every night.

They only gave us food once a day and water twice, ”the young man said, according to Reuters.

The return of the school children comes just 24 hours after Boko Haram released a video in which it showed a dozen children, one of whom said they were in the hands of "the Abu Shekau gang". in reference to the leader of this terrorist group.

The teenager also stated that a total of 520 students were kidnapped, but that some of them have died in the Army's attempts to free them.

The authenticity of the video has not been confirmed.

The abduction of the more than 300 adolescents occurred last Friday when dozens of men on motorcycles and armed with AK-47 rifles attacked the Government Science Secondary School, a male institute located in the town of Kankara, in the state of Katsina , in the north of the country.

After an exchange of gunfire with law enforcement, they managed to kidnap hundreds of students who were forcibly transferred by buses and then on foot to a wooded area in the neighboring state of Zamfara.

The next day, Boko Haram took over this kidnapping through an audio from a man who claimed to be Abubakar Shekau himself.

"What happened in Katsina has been to promote Islam and discourage anti-Islamic practices such as Western education, which is not the type of education allowed by Allah and his prophet [Muhammad]," said the leader of this jihadist group.

If true, the authorship would be a demonstration of the group's expansion into new territories, since its main bases are in the northeast of the country, hundreds of kilometers from Katsina.

According to the agency France Press, which cites sources from the security forces, the kidnapping would have been coordinated by an arms dealer named Awwalun Daudawa, who had the help of two known criminals, Idi Minoriti and Dankarami, gang leaders who They have terrorized northwestern Nigeria for years with thefts of cattle and kidnappings carried out with great violence.

The children would have been separated into different groups, each of them controlled by a different gang.

The aforementioned Daudawa could have some kind of alliance with Boko Haram and act on their behalf, according to the same sources.