Dozens of Students are abducted from a boarding School in Nigeria and one death is reported

Forty-two people, including 27 students, were abducted from a boarding school in the center of Nigeria, two months after the kidnapping of 344 teenagers in a neighboring region that shocked the world, the Government reported this Wednesday.

The authorities also report the death of an individual in the conflict and that the number of kidnappings could be higher.

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari ordered the armed forces and the police to immediately return all captives unharmed.

The attack by the gunmen took place in Kagara, a boarding school in the state of Niger.

“The bandits attacked the school around 02:00 on Wednesday. In total, they kidnapped 42 people ”, Muhammad Sani Idris, a local government information official, told AFP on Wednesday.

“At the time of the attack, there were 650 students in the school. They took 27 students with three teachers. A student was killed. They also kidnapped 12 members of the teachers’ families ”, added.

“This is the last evaluation we have made after the verifications“, He said.

The kidnappers “They have not yet tried to contact us”, Sani Idris added.

In the morning, a security source and an official told AFP that “hundreds of students” had been kidnapped in the attack.

The soldiers, with air support, are searching for the kidnappers and hostages, a security source told AFP.

For almost a decade, the northwest and central Nigeria have been plagued by the violence of criminal groups that multiply kidnappings for ransom and the theft of livestock.

These criminal gangs are driven by greed, but some have ties to jihadist groups present in the Northeast.

This was the case of those who kidnapped 344 students from a boarding school in the city of Kankara, in the state of Katsina, in December.

The kidnappers acted on behalf of the jihadist group Boko Haram, whose stronghold is hundreds of kilometers away in northeastern Nigeria.

The Kankara teenagers were released after a week of captivity and after negotiations between the gangs and local governments.

The abduction caused a global commotion and brought to mind that of more than 200 girls by Boko Haram in Chibok (northeast) in 2014.

On February 9, the kidnapper, Awwalun Daudawa, surrendered to the authorities in exchange for an amnesty agreement.

The authorities have tried to negotiate agreements with these groups, offering them an amnesty in exchange for the surrender of their weapons.

“Nigeria must accept that it faces enormous security problems”Idayat Hassan, director of the Center for Democracy and Development, told AFP.

For these criminal groups, “The easiest way to get money from the government is to kidnap school children”, He said.

“The government urgently needs to make schools safe, otherwise the kidnapping of Chibok and Kankara will encourage others to do worse,” added.

The governor of the state of Niger, Abubakar Sani Bello, ordered the immediate closure and until further notice of the internees in four districts of his state.