Violence erupts as schoolgirls return to families

ONE moment, Hadiza was weeping and flinging her arms around her father for the first time since her abduction; the next – gunfire and tear gas filled the air and people ran for cover.

It was supposed to be a joyous reunion to end the five-day ordeal of 279 girls kidnapped last week from the Jangebe Government Girls Science Secondary School in a remote corner of north-west Nigeria.

Cheering children had lined the street as buses brought the girls back to their school from the Zamfara state capital, Gusau, where they had been cared for since their release on Tuesday.

Relatives crammed around the buses, and parents laughed with joy as they found their daughters.

Less than 40 minutes later, pandemonium broke out. As government officials in a hall were giving lengthy speeches in front of the girls, impatient parents burst in and grabbed their children to take them home. The officials ran out and reporters heard gunshots outside the school gates. They saw police firing tear gas at a group of protesters outside the school, and soldiers shooting into the air.

At least three people were hit by bullets, but it was not clear by whom.

A journalist’s video showed hundreds of people fleeing down a side street. Elsewhere, people threw rocks at government officials’ and reporters’ cars hurriedly leaving town.

The chaos drives home the desperation of the situation in north-west Nigeria, where banditry has festered for years, rendering large swathes of the region lawless.

Kidnapping children from boarding schools was started by the jihadist group, Boko Haram, which abducted 270 schoolgirls from the north-east in 2014, about 100 of whom have never been found. It has since been taken up by armed criminal gangs seeking a ransom – the Jangebe abduction was the third mass school kidnapping in northern Nigeria since December.

Military and police attempts to tackle the gangs have had little success, while many worry that state authorities are letting kidnappers go unpunished, paying them off or, as in Zamfara, giving them amenities.

President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday called for the captors to be brought to justice. He ordered military deployment to Zamfara, banned mining and imposed a no-fly zone in the state.