Video shows gunmen beating kidnapped students in Nigeria
A video has emerged showing a group of students kidnapped from a school in northwest Nigeria beaten hard by armed men in a forest.
The footage, shared on social media, showed roughly two dozen students begging for help in English and Hausa, while cowering on a forest floor as armed captors hit them with sticks.
One student says in the video that the captors seek a 500 million-naira ($1.31 million) ransom.
“If anybody comes to rescue them without the money, they are going to kill us,” a male student says in the video as a man with a gun stands behind him.
Gunmen attacked the Federal College of Forestry on Thursday night and kidnapped more than 30 students.
Earlier on Saturday, Kaduna state security commissioner Samuel Aruwan said the number of the missing students was nine more than previously thought – 23 females and 16 males.
“The Kaduna state government is maintaining close communication with the management of the college as efforts are sustained by security agencies towards the tracking of the missing students,” Aruwan said.
College Provost Bello Mohammed Usman and the mother of one kidnapped student identified those shown in the video as some of the abducted students, including one pregnant woman.
Usman did not comment on the ransom request.
Abubakar Sadiq, executive secretary of the Kaduna State Emergency Management Agency, also refused to comment on the ransom demand, saying he was unaware of the video.
Last month, heavily armed gunmen abducted some 300 schoolchildren in the northwest.
Also in mid-December 2020, groups of gunmen kidnapped hundreds of schoolboys in Katsina State. They released the boys days later after negotiations with the government.
In 2014, 276 schoolgirls were abducted in the northeastern town of Chibok. A foreign-brokered deal enabled the release of 103 of the girls in October 2016 and May 2017.
Authorites say gangs involved in the kidnappings are driven by financial motives, but security officials are concerned that they are being infiltrated by Takfiri terrorists from the northern and northeastern states.
Those parts of the country have been wracked by years of violence involving Boko Haram and the West Africa Province (ISWAP) branch of the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group.
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