‘Repentant bandits’ helped free schoolgirls
GUSAU: “Repentant bandits” helped to secure the release of 279 schoolgirls who were kidnapped last week in Nigeria’s northwesterly Zamfara state, the state governor told a news conference.
All the girls who had been kidnapped from the Government Girls Science Secondary (GGSS) school in the town of Jangebe were freed.
“Those repentant ones are working for us, and they are working for the government and they are working for security,” governor Bello Matawalle said yesterday.
The government last week said 317 had been kidnapped.
Gunmen abducted the girls from the GGSS in Jangebe town on Friday, in the latest in a series of mass kidnappings of students in the West African nation.
After the meeting, the girls were escorted outside and lined up to be taken away in vans.
They ranged in ages from 10 and up.
They would be taken for medical examinations before being reunited with their families.
“Alhamdulillah! (God be praised!) It gladdens my heart to announce the release of the abducted students...,” Matawalle said in a post on Twitter yesterday.
At the time of the attack, one resident said that the gunmen also attacked a nearby military camp and checkpoint, preventing soldiers from responding to the mass abduction at the school.
Matawalle called for greater vigilance to prevent bandits from carrying out such attacks.
He urged police and military to pursue the kidnappers, and warned that policies of making payments to bandits will backfire.