Gunmen abducted about 30 students from a forestry training school in the state of Kaduna, in northern Nigeria, on Thursday night, as confirmed by the commissioner for Internal Affairs of the state, Samuel Aruwan, in a statement.
This is the fifth massive kidnapping of students suffered by Nigeria, specifically its north and central-west regions, since last December.
The previous four ended with the release of all the kidnapped youths after negotiation processes and the promise of benefits to the kidnappers.
A large number of assailants, who in Nigeria are described as "bandits", entered the Federal College of Forest Mechanization located in the town of Afaka, in the local area of Igabi, around 11:30 p.m. this Thursday, according to Aruwan, who number 210 people initially kidnapped among students of both sexes and school personnel.
"Nigerian Army troops rescued 180 citizens, most of them students, this Friday morning," said the commissioner in his statement.
According to Aruwan's account, the criminals broke through a perimeter wall and entered the school premises for some 600 meters before reaching the first building.
After receiving an emergency phone call, the Kaduna Department of Internal Affairs notified the Nigerian Army, which sent troops to the scene.
After a confrontation, the soldiers managed to rescue 180 people this morning, including 42 girls, 130 boys and eight members of the staff, some of whom were injured and were transferred to a military hospital.
"However, we are missing 30 students, including men and women."
A combined team from the Army, Aviation, Police and Nigerian intelligence agency DSS has launched an operation to try to locate the missing students.
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Yesterday is the fifth mass kidnapping of students in northwestern Nigeria within three months, all of them carried out by armed gangs that have found a lucrative business in this criminal activity.
The previous four ended with the release of the students days later after negotiations or a promise of benefits to the kidnappers who surrendered.
Only in one of them was the release after a confrontation with the police.
The total number of students kidnapped since then rises to 798.
Headache
These mass kidnappings have become a headache for the Nigerian President, Muhammadu Buhari, who has criticized the state authorities for this policy of agreements and amnesties for these criminal groups.
At the end of February, Buhari banned all mining activity and aircraft overflights in the state of Zamfara, where the penultimate kidnapping took place, in an attempt to cut off the means of financing the “bandits”.
The first and most mediatic mass kidnapping of students in Nigeria was carried out by the jihadist group Boko Haram in 2014, when they kidnapped 276 girls from the Chibok high school, in the northeast of the country.
Of these, at least a hundred have not yet been released.
However, the recent wave of kidnappings is not directly linked to jihadist terrorism, but to armed groups that proliferate in the north and west of Nigeria.
In Kaduna alone in 2020 these gangs murdered more than 937 people, kidnapped 1,972 people and stole 7,195 head of cattle, according to the agency France Presse (Afp) the local authorities assured.