Nigeria’s Boko Haram rebels release video of abducted boys
KANKARA, Nigeria — Nigeria’s Boko Haram jihadist rebels have launched a video purportedly displaying some of the extra than 300 schoolboys kidnapped remaining week from a authorities boarding college in the northwestern city of Kankara.
In the extra than six-minute-long video viewed by means of Associated Press journalists, the students’ captors inform one boy to repeat the kidnappers’ needs that the authorities name off its troops and plane searching for them.
A voice can be heard telling the boy what to say from in the back of the camera. The boy is actually speakme below duress. The boy says that they had been kidnapped by using a gang directed with the aid of Boko Haram factional chief Abubakar Shekau.
He stated some of these kidnappers had been killed. The kidnappers directed the adolescents to ask for ransom money. The video circulated extensively on WhatsApp and first regarded on a Nigerian newsite, HumAngle, that regularly reviews on Boko Haram.
Earlier Thursday one of the schoolboys who managed to break out instructed how he slipped away from his captors.
Usama Aminu, 17, advised The Associated Press about the assault on the college in Nigeria’s northwestern Katsina State in which guys armed with AK-47 rifles kidnapped greater than 300 college students from the boys’ school.
Usama Aminu.
Usama Aminu.
AP
It used to be late at night time remaining Friday when the college students heard gunshots, at first questioning if they had come from close by town. As quickly as he and the different college students at the Government Science Secondary School in Kankara realized there used to be a raid on the school, they scrambled out of their dormitory and scaled the school’s fence in the pandemonium.
But Aminu was once nonetheless now not safe.
“After we scaled the fence, we have been listening to voices that we have to come back,” he said. The boys again “thinking they have been police officers. Unknown to us it used to be the bandits. They then gathered us at a spot. That used to be when we realized they have been bandits, sporting army uniform,” he said.
“We walked through the night time in the bush and at break of day they observed a region and requested us to sit down,” Aminu said.
Aminu, who suffers from sickle mobile anemia, lately transferred to the Government Science Secondary School to be nearer to his household and scientific care for his condition.
In response to the abductions, Nigeria launched a rescue operation in which the police, air force and military tracked the kidnappers to their hideout in the Zango/Paula forest.
The attack, claimed with the aid of Boko Haram, Nigeria’s jihadist rebels, has caused an outcry in the West African kingdom in opposition to the authorities for no longer doing adequate to quit assaults on colleges in the north.
“When the bandits heard the sound of the helicopter hovering above they requested us to lay down below the massive timber with our face to the ground,” Aminu said.
During their hike, Aminu stated they met younger boys in their teens, armed with guns. He stated some had been younger than him.
School baggage of the kidnapped pupil from Government Science Secondary School are viewed inside their category room in Kankara, Nigeria.
School luggage of the kidnapped scholar from Government Science Secondary School are considered inside their category room in Kankara, Nigeria.
AP
Exhausted from the trek, Aminu held onto the shoulders of two buddies “as the bandits endured to flog human beings from the lower back so that they can cross faster.”
After dark, the boy determined to recite passages from the Quran. It used to be then that he managed to slip away omitted into the night time and cover in a mosque. A nearby resident ultimately discovered him coughing and supplied him an alternative of garments so that he may want to depart his college uniform behind, he said.
He returned home at around eleven pm Sunday.
His father, Aminu Ma’le, instructed AP he used to be relieved however nonetheless involved for the others. “I can't have a good time by myself due to the fact of the other boys nevertheless missing,” stated the father.
Katsina State governor Aminu Bello Masari stated that 17 boys have been rescued due to the fact that the attack, such as 15 through the military, any other through police and one boy determined roaming in the woodland who used to be introduced with the aid of residents. Aminu was once amongst these boys.
The faculty has extra than 800 college students and heaps of others additionally managed to escape. But greater than 300 stay held by insurgents, who are recognized to use toddler soldiers.
The authorities and the attackers are negotiating for the freedom of the boys, in accordance to Garba Shehu, a spokesman for Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari. Parents of the lacking college students accumulate at the college every day to anxiously wait for information from their sons.
To forestall any different faculty abductions, Katsina State shut down all its boarding schools. The nearby states of Zamfara, Jigawa and Kano have additional closed colleges as a precautionary measure.
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