Nigeria’s Katsina school abduction: Boko Haram says it took the students
Written by Mafken FM Newsroom on 15 December 2020
Nigeria-based Islamist militant group Boko Haram has said it was behind last week’s kidnapping of hundreds of schoolboys in the north-western Nigerian state of Katsina.
More than 300 pupils are unaccounted for, but others managed to escape.
The authorities had previously blamed “bandits” for the attack.
Boko Haram has been notorious over the last decade for school kidnappings, including in Chibok in 2014, but these have taken place in the north-east.
In an audio message about the abductions, its leader Abubakar Shekau said “what happened in Katsina was our responsibility” and that his group opposed Western education.
This year hundreds of people in Nigeria’s north-west region have been killed in attacks by what authorities have called criminal gangs, but until now it has been unclear whether they had links with Boko Haram.
The militant group has waged a brutal insurgency since 2009, mostly focused in north-eastern Nigeria. Tens of thousands of people have died and millions have been forced from their homes.
