NIGERIA RESCUES 350 KIDS ABDUCTED BY GUNMEN

Security forces on Thursday rescued nearly 350 schoolboys who had been kidnapped in northwestern Nigeria and taken into a vast forest, the governor of Katsina state said, bringing relief to many families, Afolabi Sotunde and Ismail Abba reported for Reuters.

It was not immediately clear whether all the missing boys had been recovered. “I think we have recovered most of the boys,” Governor Aminu Bello Masari said in a televised interview with state channel NTA. Hours earlier, a video started circulating online purportedly showing Islamist militants from Boko Haram with some of the boys. Reuters was unable to immediately verify the authenticity of the footage, the boys, or who released it.

The abduction gripped a country already incensed by widespread insecurity, and evoked memories of Boko Haram’s 2014 kidnapping of more than 270 schoolgirls in the northeastern town of Chibok.

On Friday night, gunmen raided the Government Science Secondary School in Katsina on motorbikes and marched the boys into Rugu forest, in the biggest such incident in the lawless region in recent years.

Masari said a total of 344 boys held in the forest had been freed in neighboring Zamfara state. He did not say how many had been missing or how they were freed.

WEEKLY FEATURE

CHINKEE TAN SEEKS TO CREATE 100 MILLIONAIRES IN 2021