Katsina, Nigeria – Dozens of abducted schoolchildren returned home on Friday, a day after they were rescued by security forces in northwestern Nigeria.
Television pictures showed the boys, many of them wearing light green uniforms and holding blankets, arriving on buses, looking bored, but otherwise many were good.
A boys’ secondary school in Kankara town in Katsina state was raided by gunmen on Friday last week and about 350 of them went into the vast Rugu forest. It is not clear whether they were all found in the rescue operation.
In a file flipped by soldiers, no boy entered the government building as he walked off the bus. A group of his parents were waiting to meet him again in another part of town.
“I couldn’t believe what I heard until neighbors started telling me it was true,” Hafsat Fantua, the mother of 16-year-old Hamza Naziru, said in a phone interview.
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Describing the moment she heard the news, she said she happily ran out of the house “not knowing where to go” before returning home to pray.
Another parent, Husseini Ahmed, whose 14-year-old son, Mohammed Husseini, was among those abducted, expressed happiness and relief that he would soon be reunited with his son.
“We look forward to their return with happiness and anxiety,” he said.
Hours before the boys’ rescue was announced, an online online spread was launched in a video showing Boko Haram Islamist militants with some boys. Reuters could not immediately verify the veracity of the footage that leaked it.
The mass kidnappings have put pressure on the government to deal with terrorists in the north of the country, especially President Muhammadu Buhari, who comes from Katsina and has repeatedly said that Boko Haram has been technically defeated.
