No more ransoms, says president
The 279 girls snatched by gunmen from a boarding school in Nigeria last week were beaten and threatened with being shot, they have revealed after being freed.
‘‘They started hitting us with guns so that we would move,’’ Farida Lawali, 15, said as she described being marched barefoot through scrub and being held in a forest.
Nigerian authorities have denied that any ransom was paid for the safe return of the girls yesterday, four days after the night raid on the Government Girls Secondary School in the northwestern state of Zamfara, which has been overrun by armed gangs.
Parents and the girls wept with relief as they gathered at the state building in Zamfara. President Muhammadu Buhari who is under pressure to halt the security crisis in the northwest, said news of the girls’ release brought ‘‘overwhelming joy’’.
Buhari has told state officials to review ‘‘their policy of rewarding bandits with money and vehicles’’, saying that it ‘‘could backfire with disastrous consequences’’.
Bello Matawalle, the governor of Zamfara, denied that money had changed hands for the girls’ freedom. He said that ‘‘repentant bandits’’ working with the government under an amnesty programme had helped to secure their release.
Boarding schools in the region have become targets for mass kidnappings for ransom by armed criminal gangs. The kidnapping of the girls last Friday in the remote town of Jangebe was the second in little over a week in the northwest, and the third in three months.
At least US$11 million was paid to kidnappers between January 2016 and March 2020, according to S B Morgen, a geopolitical research consultancy in Lagos.