Gunmen kidnap 300 students in northwest Nigeria

Kuriga, March 10: Rashidat Hamza is in despair. All but one of her six children are among the nearly 300 students abducted from their school in Nigeria’s northwest, riddled with Islamic extremists and armed gangs. It has been more than two days after her children – ages 7 to 18 – went to school in the remote town of Kuriga in Kaduna state only to be kidnapped by gunmen. She was still in shock on Saturday.
Authorities said at least 100 children aged 12 or younger were among the abductees in the state known for violent killings, lawlessness and dangerous roads where people get regularly snatched.
“We don’t know what to do, but we believe in God,” Hamza told The Associated Press during a visit to the town.
The mass kidnapping in Kuriga was the third in northern Nigeria since last week; a group of gunmen abducted 15 children from a school in another northwestern state, Sokoto, before dawn on Saturday, and a few days earlier 200 people, mostly women and children displaced by conflict, were kidnapped in northeastern Borno State.
The kidnappings are a stark reminder of the security crisis plaguing Africa’s most populous country.
No group claimed responsibility for any of the recent abductions. But Islamic extremists waging an insurgency in the northeast are suspected of carrying out the kidnapping in Borno.
Locals blame the school abductions on herders who are in conflict with the settled communities.
It’s not the first time for a student kidnapping in Nigeria to shock the world. In 2014, Islamic extremists abducted more than 200 schoolgirls from Borno’s Chibok. A decade later, at least 1,400 Nigerian students have so far been abducted from their schools in similar circumstances.
Nigerian police and soldiers headed into the forests on Friday to search for the missing children, but combing the wooded expanses of northwestern Nigeria could take weeks, observers said. (AP)