Students abducted from forestry college Nigeria.

Students were recently abducted from forestry college in Nigeria by Gunmen. Shooters took about 30 female students hostage from Northwestern Nigeria.

Dozens of students have been kidnapped from forestry college in Nigeria.

A college official said all those taken by the gunmen were female students.

Shooters in northwestern Nigeria kidnapped about 30 students overnight from a forestry college close to a military academy, three students stated on Friday. This is the fourth mass school abduction since December.

The Federal College of Forestry Mechanisation is located in the outskirts of Kaduna city, the capital of Kaduna state. The region is full of armed gang members, who usually travel on motorcycles.

Samuel Aruwan, Kaduna state’s security commissioner, confirmed the attack but did not say how many students had been taken.

Sani Danjuma, a college student, explained that those kidnapped were all female students, but authorities have not yet confirmed this information. Other students stated that some of the young women narrowly escaped during the attack.

Through a phone call, one of the residents, Haruna Salisu, said that he had heard sporadic gunshots around 11:30 pm.

“We were not panicking because we thought that it was a normal military exercise conducted at the Nigerian Defence Academy,”

“It was when we came out for dawn prayers at about 5:20 am that we noticed some of the students, teachers, and security personnel panicking all over the school premises. They told us that gunmen stormed the school and kidnapped some of the students.”

 Mr. Salisu said he saw a military official leading the remaining students back to the academy.

On Friday morning, 12th March, relatives of students gathered at the college gates, surrounded by about 20 army trucks.

Bandits have thrived for years in northwest Nigeria, rendering large areas of the region lawless.

 The jihadist group Boko Haram began the abduction from boarding schools in 2014. They seized 270 schoolgirls from a school at Chibok located in the northeast in 2014, and about 100 of them never returned.

Since then, abduction has been taken up by armed criminal groups requesting a ransom.

In the past couple of weeks, 279 schoolgirls were released after being kidnapped from their boarding school at Jangebe, located in northwest Nigeria’s Zamfara state. Twenty-seven teenage boys were also released after being abducted from their school located in the north-central state of Niger. In addition to three staff and 12 family members, one student was killed in that attack.

Military and police attempts to capture the gangs have barely yielded any success. Many worry that state authorities are worsening the situation by letting kidnappers go unpunished. The state authorities rather pay them off or giving them amenities as in Zamfara. 

In late February, the presidency stated that President Muhammadu Buhari had informed state governments to “go over their policy of rewarding bandits with money and vehicles. The presidency warned that the policy might backfire terribly.”

The unrest is now a major political problem for the president, who is currently facing countless criticisms over the rise in violent crime in the country.