Nigerian schoolgirls recount kidnap ordeal
Gunmen have freed all 279 girls kidnapped from a boarding school found in northwest Nigeria, officials said on Tuesday, while victims described how their abductors had beaten and threatened to shoot them.The pupils from Jangebe, a town in Zamfara state, were abducted soon after midnight on Friday. All got nowadays been freed, Zamfara Governor Bello Matawalle explained. Umma Abubakar, among those introduced, described their ordeal.
"Many of us got injured in our feet and we're able to not continue trekking, so they said they'll shoot anybody who did not continue steadily to walk," she told Reuters. Boarding schools in northern Nigeria have grown to be targets for mass kidnappings for ransom by armed criminal gangs, a trend began by the jihadist group Boko Haram and continued by its offshoot, Islamic State West Africa Province.
Friday's raid on the federal government Girls Science Secondary School was the next such abduction in little over weekly in the northwest, an area more and more targeted by gangs. Governor Matawalle explained "repentant bandits" dealing with the federal government under an amnesty programme had helped protected the Jangebe girls' release.
"Those repentant ones will work for us, plus they are doing work for the government plus they are doing work for security," he said. Initial reports put the number kidnapped at 317, but Zamfara government spokesman Sulaiman Tanau Anka explained the full total was 279, as a number of the girls experienced come across the bush during the raid.
Reuters journalists in Zamfara's state capital, Gusau, saw dozens of girls found in Muslim veils sitting found in a hall in circumstances government construction. A few parents arrived, and one father wept with joy after discovering his daughter. A lot of the girls came out unharmed, but at least a dozen were sent to the hospital.
Farida Lawali, 15, told how she and the other girls have been taken to a forest by the kidnappers. "They carried the sick types that cannot maneuver. We were taking walks in the stones and thorns," she said, seated in the federal government house construction, protected in a light blue veil. "They started striking us with guns in order that we could maneuver," she added. "While these were beating them with guns, a number of them had been crying and moving concurrently."President Muhammadu Buhari, who met his leading security officials on Tuesday, said news of the girls' release brought "overwhelming joy". He warned against having to pay ransoms to kidnappers, that your national government offers denied doing.
"Ransom payments will continue steadily to prosper kidnapping," Buhari stated, urging the authorities and the military to get the kidnappers to justice. One father, whose seven daughters had been among those kidnapped and freed, explained the incident wouldn't normally deter him from schooling his children."It's a ploy to deny our girls ... from getting the Western education where we are far behind," Lawal Abdullahi informed Reuters. "We have to certainly not succumb to blackmail. My advice to government is that they should take immediate precautions to avoid further abductions."
The U.N. children's agency UNICEF urged the Nigerian government to protect schools so children will never be fearful of likely to school, and parents afraid of mailing their children to school. As recently as Saturday, gunmen unveiled 27 teenage boys who had been kidnapped from their school on Feb. 17 in Niger state.In 2014, Boko Haram abducted a lot more than 270 schoolgirls from the northeasterly town of Chibok, in Nigeria's most high-profile school kidnapping. Around 100 remain missing.
