Militants release 13 hostages
KANO: Jihadist group Boko Haram has released 13 hostages, including a group of oil explorers and policewomen, that it held captive for more than half a year, the Nigerian presidency said on Saturday.
The three oil explorers are lecturers from Maiduguri university, in northern Borno state, who were kidnapped while searching for oil in July last year.
Their exploration team was ambushed by Boko Haram in an attack that killed at least 69 people, one of the bloodiest assaults of last year.
A group of 10 women were also released, including police officers and civil servants, who were kidnapped near Maiduguri in June.
Police initially denied the kidnapping until Boko Haram released a video weeks later showing the woman pleading for their freedom.
“Their release followed a series of negotiations as directed by President Buhari and was facilitated by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC),” said presidency spokesman Garba Shehu in a statement.
“All 13 rescued persons are in the custody of the service and are on their way to Abuja with the assistance of the Nigerian Army and the Air Force.”
Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, has been at the epicentre of the Islamist insurgency that has devastated the northeast of the country.
According to military and vigilante sources in Banki, a former town that is now a camp for internally displaced people on the Cameroon border, ICRC vehicles arrived around 12.45pm on Saturday and drove into the bush.
They returned around 4.30 pm with the 10 women and three men, who were then flown in four helicopters — two ICRC, one military, one police — to Maiduguri.
Boko Haram’s capacity has been weakened since 2014 when it controlled swathes of territory in northeast Nigeria but it still poses a threat.
At least 20,000 people have been killed in nearly nine years of violence and more than 2.6 million made homeless, triggering a humanitarian crisis across the Lake Chad region.