Kidnappers free 90 pupils in restive Cameroon region

Ninety children kidnapped at a school in a troubled Englishspeaking region of Cameroon have been freed, officials said on Wednesday, revealing that in addition to 79 students whose abduction had already been announced, 11 schoolmates were seized last week.

All are enrolled at the Presbyterian Secondary School in Bamenda, capital of Cameroon’s Northwest Region – one of two areas where surging anglophone separatist militancy has been met with a brutal crackdown by authorities.

Communications minister Issa Bakary Tchiroma said all 79 students seized on Monday had been released, without giving details of the circumstances under which they were set free.

The pupils were kidnapped with their principal, a teacher and a driver, but Tchiroma said their fate was not yet clear.

Separately, the Presbyterian Church, which runs the school, said that 11 other pupils were taken on October 31 but had now been freed.

News of their disappearance had been withheld to enable negotiations with the kidnappers, the church said.

It said the school, on the outskirts of Bamenda where there is a negligible security-forces presence, would remain shuttered until further notice.

On Tuesday, a leading member of the church, Reverend Foki Samuel Forba, said he had been negotiating with the kidnappers, who were not demanding a ransom but the closure of the school.

The kidnappings were the first such mass abductions seen in Cameroon and coincide with an upsurge of political tensions in the majority French-speaking country.

The release was announced a day after Cameroon’s President Paul Biya, 85, was sworn in for a seventh term in office.

A six-minute video seen by AFP on Monday, but which could not be confirmed independently, showed 11 boys aged about 15 giving their identity and name of the school in English, and adding that they were abducted by the “Amba Boys” – a name for anglophone separatists.

On Tuesday, Biya promised to pursue policies of decentralisation to address “frustrations and aspirations” in Englishspeaking regions – his first public acknowledgement of the resentments that have spilled over in Cameroon’s anglophone Northwest and Southwest regions.