New Delhi: Over 500 people, including school students and young women, have been abducted in northern Nigeria in just a week, bringing back fears of the dark past when kidnapping by Islamist terror group Boko Haram was widely prevalent.
The group, however, has not claimed responsibility for these kidnappings, prompting speculation about who the perpetrators might be this time around.
Three kidnappings occurred between 29 February and 7 March.
The first was on 29 February in northeastern Borno state where 200 young women and children were snatched from a camp for displaced people.
The most daring was on 7 March when unidentified gunmen stormed a school in northwest Kaduna’s Kuriga and took 287 children, some as young as seven years.
The third kidnapping was also on the same day in a boarding school in Sokoto, from where 15 children were taken.
Meanwhile, CNN reported Thursday that the gunmen behind the Kaduna kidnapping have demanded a ransom of 1 billion naira ($621,848) and threatened to kill all students if their demands were not met.
The report quoted Aminu Jibril, a resident of Kuriga village, as saying, “They called me from a hidden number yesterday (Tuesday) afternoon at around 16 minutes past 12, and demanded 1 billion naira ($621,848) as a ransom for the students. They said (the ultimatum) will only last for three weeks or 20 days from the date they kidnapped the children and if there’s no action from the government, they will kill all of them.”
Jibril also said the abductors told him the kidnapping was “a way of getting back at the government and security agencies for killing their gang members”.
Notorious for mass abductions
The West African country has long grappled with repeated mass kidnappings for ransom by armed groups that terrorise rural areas.
In 2014, over 250 school girls were kidnapped from Chibok, Borno. Since then, over 17 kidnapping incidents have taken place in the past 10 years. The last was in 2021, when 150 school children were taken from Kaduna.
The chairperson of the African Union, former Chadian prime minister Moussa Faki, condemned the abductions on 9 March and called for the victims’ immediate release.
The Nigerian armed forces have been sent out to scout the region and rescue those. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in a post on microblogging site X expressed confidence that the children would be found.
I have received briefings from security chiefs on the two incidents in Borno and Kaduna, and I am confident that the victims will be rescued. Nothing else is acceptable to me and the waiting family members of these abducted citizens. Justice will be decisively administered.
To…
— Bola Ahmed Tinubu (@officialABAT) March 8, 2024
Who is behind the attacks?
At first, the 29 February incident from Borno seemed like a return of Boko Haram. The Islamist group has been accused of large-scale violence in northeastern Nigeria since the late 2000s, and had kidnapped female students aged between 16 and 18 from Chibok in Borno in 2014.
However, these kidnappings did not merely focus on female victims, but also older boys, which has caused confusion about who the offenders might now be.
With the crime rate at a high in the state and development slow, it is believed that “bandits” or criminals loot villages, and indulge in kidnapping for ransom.
The bandits, according to the Human Rights Watch, emerged following years of conflict between nomadic herdsmen and farming communities. They possess military-grade weapons and are operational in the northwest.
“Kidnap-for-ransom in Nigeria is a low-risk, high-reward business. Those abducted are usually freed after money is handed over, and the perpetrators are rarely arrested,” Dr Neha Sinha, assistant professor, Department of Political Science at B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi told ThePrint. “They are motivated by money. They have no political agenda and no clear-cut leadership.”
A former senator from Kaduna, Shehu Sani, told CBS News that the government “will feel immense pressure and pay the ransom” and rescue the children. He did not provide any information about who had asked for ransom. Kudna state alone accounts for four large kidnapping attacks on schools in the last four years.
The CBS News report quoted regional security expert David Otto as saying that the situation in Nigeria is risky, with the government losing control over the country’s security. Moreover, the state is unable to protect not only children but also those in displaced camps.
“There are communities that feel unprotected,” in Nigeria, Sinha said, adding that Kuriga was one of them.
The Displacement Tracking Matrix of the International Organization for Migration identified a total of over 10 lakh internally displaced people in the country, with most of them lacking water, sanitation, and healthcare facilities. People have been displaced due to continued violence and natural calamities like floods.
Also read: Exclusive-Nigerian kidnappers demand $620,000 for release of school hostages, local authorities say