KANO (Nigeria), July 8 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Armed attackers known as bandits have killed 18 people in a raid on a village in northwest Nigeria’s Katsina state, police said Wednesday.
State police spokesman Gambo Isah said that a large group of assailants arrived in the village of Tsauwa on motorbikes late Monday, gunning down villagers and looting homes before burning them.
“The bandits killed 18 people in the raid and left one injured, while another resident went missing,” Isah said, adding that they “burned homes and took away an unspecified number of cattle”.
Isah suggested that the attack might have been “punishment” for the villagers’ refusal to cooperate with armed groups in the region and determined resistance against previous raids.
Dubbed bandits by the authorities, criminal groups have long terrorised northwestern and central Nigeria, raiding villages, stealing cattle, and abducting people travelling along the regions’ roads for ransom.
Many are based in camps in the Rugu forest, which straddles Katsina, Kaduna, Zamfara and Niger states.
More recently, criminal gangs have attacked schools and universities, kidnapping pupils and students en masse for ransoms stretching into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per group.
On Monday more than 100 students were kidnapped from a high school in neighbouring Kaduna state, with the hostage-takers on Wednesday demanding food for their captives as they await a ransom payout.
Parents of those missing said that the kidnappers promised the children would be safe if parents delivered rice, beans, palm oil, salt and stock cubes. They said abductors told them that a ransom demand would follow.
“Search and rescue operations (are) ongoing and we strongly believe that these students will safely return to their parents soon,” Reverend IA Jangado said in a statement.
The Baptist cleric also confirmed the demand for food.
Humanitarian agencies warn that the rise in school kidnappings is disrupting the education of hundreds of thousands of Nigerian children.
The United Nations children’s agency UNICEF estimates that more than about 1,120 schools are closed across northwestern Nigeria. Even where schools are open, some parents are too afraid to send their children. Some 300,000-400,000 students in the region are out of school because of insecurity, UNICEF said. — NNN-AGENCIES
