Another 130 children abducted in November in a raid on a school in Niger state in north-central Nigeria have been released on Sunday.
“The remaining 130 schoolchildren abducted by terrorists…have now been released. They are expected to arrive in Minna on Monday and rejoin their parents for the Christmas celebration,” President Bola Tinubu’s aide Bayo Onanuga said in a post on X. “The freedom of the schoolchildren followed a military-intelligence driven operation.”
He said the total of freed students is now 230.
Gunmen abducted 315 students and staff on November 21 from the St Mary’s Catholic boarding school in Papiri village.
It was not yet clear which group carried out the kidnappings or how Nigerian authorities secured the release of those abducted.
Some 100 pupils of the school were released on December 8.
Some 50 children managed to escape at the time of the attack, the Christian Association of Nigeria said.
The AFP news agency cited a UN source on Sunday as saying that all those taken appeared to have been released.
Nigeria has for years grappled with armed groups, known locally as “bandits,” that raid villages and abduct people for ransom, particularly in the northwest of the country.
The West African country’s kidnapping crisis has intensified in recent months, with Nigeria’s Punch newspaper reporting early in December that some 490 people had been abducted in two weeks.
On December 2, Defense Minister Badaru Abubakar resigned amid the spate of abductions.
Meanwhile, Nigeria’s northeast has been beset by an Islamist insurgency, with militants also carrying out kidnappings.
The Boko Haram militant group abducted some 300 schoolgirls in 2014, with some of the students still missing. – DW.
