Crime At least 287 Nigerian students abducted from school by gunmen, say authorities

[LeonardoBjj]

Assailants reportedly surrounded Kuriga school as pupils were starting the day in second abduction in country in less than a week

Gunmen have attacked a school in Nigeria’s north-west region seizing at least 287 students, in the second mass abduction in the West African nation in less than a week.

Authorities had said earlier that more than 100 students were taken hostage in the attack. But Sani Abdullahi, the headteacher, however, told Kaduna governor Uba Sani when he visited the town on Thursday that the total number of those missing after a headcount was 287.

“We will ensure that every child will come back. We are working with the security agencies,” the governor told the villagers.

Abductions of students from schools in northern Nigeria are common and have become a source of concern since 2014, when Islamic extremists kidnapped more than 200 schoolgirls in Borno state’s Chibok village. In recent years, the abductions have been concentrated in north-western and central regions, where dozens of armed groups often target villagers and travelers for huge ransoms.

The assailants stormed a government primary school in Chikun’s Kuriga town shortly after morning assembly at 8am, taking almost 200 pupils hostage before any help could come, said Joshua Madami, a local youth leader.

Security forces and a government delegation arrived in the town several hours later as a search operation widened, while community members and parents gathered to wait for news.

“The government is trying everything possible with the security agencies to see how we can rescue them,” said Musa, the council chairman.

The attack occurred days after more than 200 people, mostly women and children, were abducted by extremists in north-eastern Nigeria.

Women, children and students are often targeted in the mass abductions in the conflict-hit northern region, and many victims are released only after paying huge ransoms.

Observers say both attacks are a reminder of Nigeria’s worsening security crisis which resulted in the deaths of several hundred people in 2023, according to an Associated Press analysis.

Bola Tinubu was elected president of Nigeria last year after promising to end the violence. But there has been “no tangible improvement in security situation yet” under Tinubu, said Oluwole Ojewale, West and Central Africa researcher with the Africa-focused Institute for Security Studies.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/07/nigeria-students-abducted-by-gunmen-west-africa

 

[Chad R. Thundercock]

Let me guess: they're Muslims.

 

[IDGETKTFO]

Let me guess: they're Muslims.

The gunmen or the students?

 

[William Munny]

Didn't we already do this?

"Bring back our girls"

 

[haysus31]

Hopefully they get the global outrage that helps get the students freed. At least it's something to hope for.

 

[oldshadow]

It's sad to say but the only way this stops is if some one gets in charge and finds a way to get rich off the country and sees the only way to gold power is to hunt down and kill all theses groups.

 

[evansusmc2]

Didn't we already do this?

"Bring back our girls"

View attachment 1033276

If I remember right, about 12% of the escaped. The remaining 88% quickly got sold off to the highest bidders.

 

[GearSolidMetal]

Didn't we already do this?

"Bring back our girls"

View attachment 1033276

Was about to post exactly this.

And those girls were never returned. 9 years later God knows whatever happened to them.

That happened during Obama's years, and his bitch wife did the #BringBackOurGirls virtue-signaling social-media campaign, and it never actually was a priority within the Obama Whitehouse.

Gunmen have attacked a school in Nigeria’s north-west region seizing at least 287 students, in the second mass abduction in the West African nation in less than a week.

Until further notice, these kids should be considered to be 'completely fucked.'

Think of the resouces, facilities, and personelle it would take to abduct 300 kids.

 

[LeonardoBjj]

If I remember right, about 12% of the escaped. The remaining 88% quickly got sold off to the highest bidders.

- It's happened last year also. The girls are sould as sex-slaves.

Was about to post exactly this.

And those girls were never returned. 9 years later God knows whatever happened to them.

That happened during Obama's years, and his bitch wife did the #BringBackOurGirls virtue-signaling social-media campaign, and it never actually was a priority within the Obama Whitehouse.

Until further notice, these kids should be considered to be 'completely fucked.'

Think of the resouces, facilities, and personelle it would take to abduct 300 kids.

- They kidnap those girls to sell them.

Yes, those abducted Nigerian schoolgirls really could be sold into slavery. Here's how.​

"I abducted your girls. By Allah, I will sell them in the marketplace."

So said Abubakar Shekau, the mastermind behind the horrific kidnapping of roughly 300 girls from their school in Nigeria, in a video obtained by Agence-France Press. Shekau's motivation is both ideological and financial: his group Boko Haram is militantly opposed to educating girls, and also uses abductions to finance its campaign of killing in and around eastern Nigeria.

Normally, those abductions are kidnappings aimed at getting a ransom. But Shekau's threat to sell the 276 girls that he still holds prisoner in "the marketplace" is not in the least idle. West Africa is one of the hubs of the global slave trade. Selling these abducted girls as property would be horrifyingly easy for Boko Haram because slave trading is so common in and around Nigeria.

Modern slavery is widespread and horrifying. Walk Free, an Australia-based anti-slavery group, estimates that about 30 million people are still forced into sex slavery (either in brothels or as "child brides"), hard labor, or marching in armies as a child. Modern slavery thrives on human trafficking, the recruitment and transportation of persons marked for slavery or other kinds of exploitation.

Before we get into the depressing details of how modern slavery operates in West Africa, here's a map of the region for context — you'll see Nigeria on the right-hand side.

According to Walk Free, nine of these countries —Mauritania, Benin, Cote d'Ivoire, Gambia, Gabon, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo, and Cape Verde — are in the 16 countries globally where people are most likely to be enslaved and trafficked across international borders as property. That means over half of the world's worst slaving countries are in the same neighborhood as Nigeria.

While Nigeria itself isn't on that list, it has an arguably more dubious distinction. Nigeria is enormous: it has about 168 million people, over half of West Africa's total population. This means it has the largest enslaved population in the region — roughly 700,000, by Walk Free's estimate. That's the fourth largest slave population in the world, surpassed only by those in India, China, and Pakistan.

The prevalence of slavery in Nigeria and around it makes it terribly easy for Boko Haram to sell the kidnapped girls if it so chooses. Human traffickers coexist alongside other criminals around the region — drug smugglers, arms dealers, and Islamic militant groups. Each of these groups, in their own ways, weaken and corrupt local police and border enforcement so they can ply their trades. These weakened institutions are part of why West African countries have had so little success cracking down on the local slave trade.

There's a bit of a chicken and an egg problem here, as weak state institutions are also what allowed the slave trade to flourish in the first place. Many West African countries are poor and plagued by conflict, weakening already-weak border controls. Others, like Gabon, are fairly wealthy, and have become net-slave importers.

Nigeria is more of the former. Most Nigerians today are poorer than they were when the country became independent in 1960, and the government can't keep up with many of its citizens' basic infrastructure and health needs. The country has never really had the resources to stamp out the slave trade.

And the people who are trafficked are often children. Here's what the UN found among the number of actually detected instances of human trafficking, which of course vastly understate the scale and horror of the problem.

So Boko Haram's willingness to threaten to sell girls into slavery is not a one-off event. It's part of a vast web of human trafficking and slavery in West Africa — one that neither local governments nor the international community have been able to shut down.

https://www.vox.com/2014/5/5/5683534/boko-haram-slavery

https://enactafrica.org/enact-observer/girls-from-karamoja-sold-for-us5-and-trafficked-to-nairobi

https://www.un.org/africarenewal/ma...irls-abducted-held-‘-slave-conditions’-darfur

 

[LeonardoBjj]

Nigeria’s kidnapped girls sold into marriage​

More than 200 kidnapped girls and women have been reportedly sold into marriage with their Boko Haram abductors for $12.

Scores of young girls and women kidnapped from a school in Nigeria are being forced to marry their Boko Haram abductors, a local human rights group has reported.

Halite Aliyu, of the Borno-Yobe People’s Forum, told the Associated Press on Wednesday that more than 200 girls who were kidnapped two weeks ago had been sold to the fighters for $12.

Aliyu said the information given about the mass weddings was coming from villagers in the Sambisa Forest, on Nigeria’s border with Cameroon where Boko Haram was known to have a number of hideouts.

“The latest reports are that they have been taken across the borders, some to Cameroon and Chad,” Aliyu said.


It was not possible to verify the reports.

Community elder Pogu Bitrus of Chibok town, from where the girls were abducted, told the BBC’s Hausa service that some of the kidnapped girls “have been married off to insurgents”.

“A medieval kind of slavery. You go and capture women and then sell them off,” Bitrus said.

At the same time, the Boko Haram network was reportedly negotiating over the students’ fate and demanding an unspecified ransom for their release, a Borno state civic leader told The Associated Press. The abductors have also claimed that two of the girls have died from snake bites.

Information regarding the girls’ exact whereabouts still remains unclear.

About 50 of the kidnapped girls managed to escape from the captors in the first days after their abduction, but some 220 remained missing, according to the principal of the Chibok Girls Secondary School, Asabe Kwambura. They are between 16 and 18 years old and had been recalled to the school to write a physics exam.

“Find Our Daughters”

The government and military’s failure to rescue the girls prompted Nigerian protesters to march on the country’s parliament on Wednesday.

The march, dubbed “A Million-Woman March” was promoted on Twitter and attracted several hundred women and men, mostly dressed in red, carrying placards that read “Find Our Daughters”.

Parents have voiced fury at the military’s rescue operation, accusing the security services of ignoring their daughters’ plight.

Former World Bank vice president and ex-Nigerian cabinet member Obiageli Ezekwesili, addressed protesters at Unity Fountain in Abuja as the march kicked off.

She accused the military of having “no coherent search-and-rescue” plan.

“If this happened anywhere else in the world, more than 200 girls kidnapped and no information for more than two weeks, the country would be brought to a standstill,” she told AFP.

The protest underscored how large parts of northeastern Nigeria remained beyond the control of the government.

Until the kidnappings, the air force had been mounting near-daily bombing raids since mid-January on the Sambisa Forest and mountain caves bordering Chad.


Aliyu said that in northeastern Nigeria “life has become nasty, short and brutish.

“We are living in a state of anarchy.”

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2014/5/1/nigerias-kidnapped-girls-sold-into-marriage

 

[Natural Order]

Religion and poverty is a dangerous mix.

 

[kflo]

unbelievable. human capacity to be horrific is pretty boundless it seems.

 

[LeonardoBjj]

Religion and poverty is a dangerous mix.

- Theres a case that guys were attacking Morocco after the quake, because the girls were without food or help, so they could get a wife!

 

[Islam Imamate]

West Africa is one of the hubs of the global slave trade.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

 

[LeonardoBjj]

Gunmen kidnap 15 children in yet another school abduction in northern Nigeria​

BY CHINEDU ASADU
Updated 5:37 PM BRT, March 9, 2024

ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) — Armed men broke into a boarding school in northwestern Nigeria early Saturday and seized 15 children as they slept, police told The Associated Press, about 48 hours after nearly 300 students were taken hostage in the conflict-hit region.

School abductions are common in Nigeria’s northern region, especially since the 2014 kidnapping of more than 200 schoolgirls by Islamic extremists in Borno state’s Chibok village shocked the world. Armed gangs have since targeted schools for kidnap ransoms, resulting in at least 1,400 abducted since then.

The gunmen in the latest attack invaded the Gidan Bakuso village of the Gada council area in Sokoto state at about 1 a.m. local time, police said. They headed to the Islamic school where they seized the children from their hostel before security forces could arrive, Sokoto police spokesman Ahmad Rufa’i told the AP.

One woman was also abducted from the village, Rufa’i said, adding that a police tactical squad was deployed to search for the students.

The inaccessible roads in the area, however, challenged the rescue operation, he said, adding: “It is a remote village (and) vehicles cannot go there; they (the police squad) had to use motorcycles to the village.”

Saturday’s attack was the third mass kidnapping in northern Nigeria since late last week, when more than 200 people, mostly women and children, were abducted by suspected extremists in Borno state. On Thursday, 287 students were also taken hostage from a government primary and secondary school in Kaduna state.

The attacks highlight once again a security crisis that has plagued Africa’s most populous country. Kidnappings for ransoms have become lucrative across Nigeria’s northern region, where dozens of armed gangs operate.

No group claimed responsibility for any of the abductions. While Islamic extremists who are waging an insurgency in northeastern Nigeria are suspected of carrying out the kidnapping in Borno state, locals blamed the school kidnappings on herders who had been in conflict with their host communities before taking up arms.

Nigeria’s Vice President Kashim Shettima, meanwhile, met with authorities and some parents of the abducted students in Kaduna state on Saturday and assured them of efforts by security forces to find the children and rescue them.

https://apnews.com/article/nigeria-...ol-northwest-c81902c65719fd07fb3d0b3e8eedb772

 

[William Munny]

unbelievable. human capacity to be horrific is pretty boundless it seems.

eg: October 7th and Hamas.


yea, but this is fucking terrible. shame this is still an issue.

 

[LeonardoBjj]

Nearly 300 Abducted Schoolchildren in Nigeria Freed​

ABUJA, NIGERIA — Nearly 300 kidnapped Nigerian schoolchildren have been released, local officials said Sunday, more than two weeks after the children were seized from their school in the northwestern state of Kaduna and marched into the forests.

At least 1,400 students have been kidnapped from Nigerian schools since 2014, when Boko Haram militants kidnapped hundreds of schoolgirls from Borno state's Chibok village in 2014. In recent years, abductions have been concentrated in the country's northwestern and central regions, where dozens of armed groups often target villagers and travelers for ransom.

Kaduna state Gov. Uba Sani did not give details of the release of the 287 students abducted from their school in the remote town of Kuriga on March 7, at least 100 of them aged 12 or younger. In a statement, he thanked Nigerian President Bola Tinubu "particularly ensuring that the abducted school children are released unharmed."

Tinubu had vowed to rescue the children "without paying a dime" as ransom. But ransoms are commonly paid for kidnappings, often arranged by families, and it is rare for officials in Nigeria to admit to the payments.

No group has claimed responsibility for the Kaduna kidnapping, which locals have blamed on bandit groups known for mass killings and kidnappings for ransom in the conflict-battered northern region, most of them former herders in conflict with settled communities.

At least two people with extensive knowledge of the security crisis in Nigeria's northwest told The Associated Press that the identity of the abductors is known.

Murtala Ahmed Rufa'i, a professor of peace and conflict studies at Usmanu Danfodiyo University, and Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, a cleric who has negotiated with the bandits, said they are hiding in the region's vast and ungoverned forests.

Arrests are rare in Nigeria's mass kidnappings, as victims are usually released only after desperate families pay ransoms or through deals with government and security officials.

The Kaduna governor thanked Nigerian security forces and officials for the release of the students. "I spent sleepless nights with the national security adviser, Mal. Nuhu Ribadu ... fine-tuning strategies and coordinating the operations of the security agencies, which eventually resulted in this successful outcome," he said.

https://www.voanews.com/a/nearly-300-abducted-schoolchildren-in-nigeria-freed-/7540374.html

 

[evansusmc2]

Dang that was quick! Glad they got freed this time around.

 

[KBE6EKCTAH_CCP]

It's sad to say but the only way this stops is if some one gets in charge and finds a way to get rich off the country and sees the only way to gold power is to hunt down and kill all theses groups.

That or a salvadorian scenario, where people get rounded up and disappear for merely belonging to a wrong group of people.

Of course it creates outrage in the loud elements of western society that are always on the lookout for criminals to side with.

 

[KBE6EKCTAH_CCP]

Amazing news on the release. God bless.