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The leader of Boko Haram, Abubakar Shekau, claimed responsibility Tuesday for the kidnapping of hundreds of high school students in northwest Nigeria, far from the usual fiefdom of this jihadist group, which reveals its expansion.
“I am Abubakar Shekau, our brothers are responsible for the kidnapping in Katsina,” announced in an oral message the leader of this group, which in 2014 already kidnapped 276 high school students in Chibok, causing a wave of worldwide indignation.
At least 333 teenagers are missing after their high school in Katsina state was attacked on Friday night, in northwestern Nigeria, hundreds of kilometers from the territory of Boko Haram, which regularly operates in the north-east of the country, around Lake Chad.
This figure of 333 schoolboys kidnapped, given by the governor of Katsina, it was confirmed on Monday by military sources.
More than a hundred armed men traveling by motorbike attacked the rural public school located in the town of Kankara.
Many teenagers managed to flee and took refuge in a nearby forest, but others were hit, separated into various groups and taken away by the assailants, according to the inhabitants with whom Agence France-Presse made contact.
The abduction was originally attributed to armed groups called “bandits” who terrorize the population in that unstable region, where kidnappings for ransom are frequent.
Jihadist spread
But many experts and observers in the region have warned of a possible rapprochement between these “bandits” and the jihadist groups that extend their influence throughout the Sahel region, from central Mali to Lake Chad in northern Cameroon.
President Muhammadu Buhari, a native of Katsina, who was in this region at the time of the kidnapping, condemned the attack and ordered that security measures be strengthened in all schools.
In Katsina state, schools were closed.
The presidency claimed on Saturday that the army had located “the refuge of the bandits” and that a military operation was underway.
Security has seriously deteriorated in northern Nigeria since the election of President Buhari in 2015, even though he had said that fighting Boko Haram was the priority of his presidential term.
Atrocities
The jihadist group of Abubakar Shekau he has committed numerous atrocities in recent weeks. He claimed the slaughter of dozens of agricultural workers near Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, and a “barbaric” attack this past weekend against a town near Diffa, in neighboring Niger, where at least 28 people were killed, most burned alive.
The 77-year-old Nigerian head of state had announced that he would speak to the National Assembly about insecurity in the country, before backtracking, by denying parliament “constitutional power to lecture the president in his role as commander general of the armed forces ”, as justified by his Minister of Justice Abubakar Malami.
The jihadist conflict has caused 36,000 deaths, essentially in the northeast of the country, and about two million displaced. It has spread to Chad, Cameroon and Niger, neighboring countries of the Lake Chad basin.
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