KATSINA, NIGERIA — Dozens of kidnapped school boys arrived back home on Friday a day after safety forces rescued them in northwest Nigeria.
Television photos confirmed the boys, a lot of them sporting mild inexperienced uniforms and clutching blankets, arriving on buses, trying weary however in any other case properly.
Gunmen raided the boys’ secondary faculty in Kankara city, Katsina state, on Friday final week and marched round 350 of them into the huge Rugu forest. It was not clear if all of them had been recovered within the rescue operation.
None of the boys spoke as they walked from the bus in single file, flanked by troopers, into a authorities constructing. A gaggle of their mother and father waited to be reunited with them in one other a part of city.
“I couldn’t believe what I heard until neighbours came to inform me that it’s true,” Hafsat Funtua, mom of 16-year-old Hamza Naziru, mentioned earlier in a cellphone interview.
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Describing the second she heard the information, she mentioned she ran out of her home with pleasure “not knowing where to go” earlier than returning home to hope.
Another father or mother, Husseini Ahmed, whose 14-year-old Mohammed Husseini was additionally amongst these kidnapped, expressed happiness and aid that he would quickly be reunited together with his son.
“We are happy and anxiously expecting their return,” he mentioned.
Hours earlier than the rescue of the boys was introduced, a video began circulating on-line purportedly displaying Islamist militants from Boko Haram with among the boys. Reuters was unable to instantly confirm the authenticity of the footage or who launched it.
The mass abduction has piled strain onto the federal government to cope with militants within the north of the nation, notably on President Muhammadu Buhari, who comes from Katsina and has repeatedly mentioned that Boko Haram has been “technically defeated.”
