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Authorities Investigate Kidnapping of Three Teachers in Northern Nigeria


The empty Federal College of Forestry Mechanization school, following an attacked by gunmen in Afaka Nigeria, March 12. 2021.
The empty Federal College of Forestry Mechanization school, following an attacked by gunmen in Afaka Nigeria, March 12. 2021.

Authorities in northern Nigeria are investigating the armed kidnapping of three teachers from a primary school, four days after dozens of students were taken from another school in Kaduna state.

The students ran away as gunmen arrived at their school in the town of Rema on motorbikes early Monday and took the teachers away Kaduna state’s security commissioner, Samuel Aruwan said during a press briefing.

Initially, two students thought to be missing were located after the attack at the Rema Primary School, located in Kaduna state’s Birnin Gwari Local Government Area.

The teachers’ abduction is the sixth time so called bandits kidnapped or attempted to take someone from a school in less than three months in northwest and central Nigeria, mostly by criminals seeking ransom.

The military is currently seeking 39 students kidnapped last Thursday from another school in Kaduna.

Authorities said the military rescued 180 other students from the Federal College of Forestry Mechanization, a research institute in the country.

The national government has been critical of local authorities paying ransoms in the kidnappings, without providing a successful remedy to the problem.

Several schools in northern and central Nigeria have closed for security reasons.

The seemingly endless spike in the number of abductions captured global attention when members of the extremist group Boko Haram kidnapped 270 girls from Nigeria’s northeastern school in Chibok in 2014.

An estimated 100 of the girls are still unaccounted for.

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