Officers killed in attack on Nigeria’s elite military academy

Gunmen have attacked Nigeria’s elite military academy, killing two officers and kidnapping another in a brazen assault on a symbol of the armed forces.

The raid on Tuesday on the Nigerian Defence Academy, the country’s main officer training school, is a major blow for a military already struggling with an armed uprising and heavily armed criminal gangs.

“The security architecture of the Nigerian Defence Academy was compromised early this morning by unknown gunmen,” said Major Bashir Muhammad Jajira, spokesman for the academy in the northwestern state of Kaduna.

“We lost two personnel and one was abducted.”

Various army units and security agencies were pursuing the attackers and trying to rescue the kidnap victim, Jajira said.

The high-security base, located just outside the state capital Kaduna, trains Nigerian officers and also cadets from other African militaries.

No group claimed responsibility, but Nigeria is facing a threat from rebels and large criminal gangs that raid villages, steal cattle and carry out mass kidnappings for ransom.

Attacks and kidnappings have surged in recent months, especially in north-central and northwest Nigeria, partly driven by economic hardship linked to disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and by the impunity enjoyed by most perpetrators.

Kaduna state, located north of the federal capital Abuja, has been the scene of mass abductions at schools and other acts of violence against communities, along with other states such as Niger, Zamfara and Katsina.

The Nigerian government has said it is winning the battle against the criminals it describes as bandits.

However, many Nigerians have stopped travelling through rural areas for fear of being abducted, many pupils have dropped out of school, and many parents are driven to desperate measures to raise ransoms to have their kidnapped children freed.

Al Jazeera

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Bandits release 15 students after parents pay ransom

Bandits have released 15 more students kidnapped last month from a Baptist school in northwest Nigeria, officials said.

School administrator Reverend John Hayab told Reuters news agency on Sunday that parents had raised and paid an undisclosed ransom to free the students, who were among more than 100 taken on July 5 from the Bethel Baptist High School.

“The students are already being released and would be handed over to their parents any moment from now,” Hayab said.

Hayab had previously said the abductors were seeking 1 million naira ($2,430) per student.

So far, 56 of the kidnapped Bethel students have been released or escaped from their abductors.

“We still have 65 more of our students with the bandits and we are working to see they can be freed,” Hayab told the AFP news agency on Sunday.

Kaduna state’s commissioner for internal security, Samuel Aruwan, confirmed the release but did not immediately comment on the ransom payment.

The Bethel abduction was part of a string of kidnappings by armed gangs known locally as bandits who have long terrorised northwest and central Nigeria, looting, stealing cattle and kidnapping for ransom.

About 1,000 students have been kidnapped since December after gangs started to target schools and colleges. Most have been released after negotiations.

But many hostages remain captive, including more than 136 children abducted in June from an Islamic seminary in Tegina in central Niger State, four of whom have died in captivity.

On Friday, the gangs asked the seminary to send clothing for the schoolchildren who have been in the same clothes for months, according to one of the parents.

“They phoned the head of the school and told him to ask parents to send the children new clothes as the ones they have been wearing are in shreds,” Maryam Mohammed, whose seven children are among the hostages, told AFP.

Last week, nine pupils of an Islamic seminary were also seized by motorcycle-riding attackers in Katsina State, the second such incident in as many months.

President Muhammadu Buhari in February called on state governments to stop paying bandits, and Kaduna Governor Nasir el-Rufai publicly refuses to pay.

But desperate parents and communities often raise and pay ransoms themselves.

Al Jazeera

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Nigeria Near Agreement to Resume Twitter Service

Twitter Inc. agreed to most of the conditions set by the Nigerian government to resume operations in the West African country, Information Minister Lai Mohammed said.

The social media giant “has met almost 70% of the government’s terms and conditions, many of them quite fundamental and important,” Mohammed said in an interview Wednesday with Bloomberg Television. “We are working on a few more.”

A spokesman for the San Francisco-based company declined to comment.

President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration blocked access to Twitter’s services in Africa’s most populous country on June 5, after the company deleted one of his tweets for violating its rules. The dispute added to other controversies Twitter has faced with government leaders, including its decision in January to ban former U.S. President Donald Trump and a clash with Indian authorities over posts on its app.

Buhari, who was briefly a military dictator during the 1980s, ran afoul of Twitter’s rules when he issued a threat to crack down on separatists he accuses of waging a rebellion in the southeast of the country.

The Nigerian government didn’t shutter Twitter because of the removal of Buhari’s tweet, Mohammed said. Rather, it was because of the use of the U.S. microblogging site by the Indigenous People of Biafra, he said.

Buhari’s government has proscribed IPOB, which wants to establish an independent nation in southeastern Nigeria, as a terrorist organization and blames the group for a series of deadly attacks this year on security forces. The group’s leader, Nnamdi Kanu, was captured in June and returned to Nigeria to continue a treason trial he fled in 2017.

“Twitter became the platform of choice for a group that was targeting policemen, killing policemen, killing the military and promoting the interest of one ethnic group against another,” Mohammed said. “For national security, we suspended the operations.”

IPOB maintains that it’s a self-determination movement committed to creating its own state for the Igbo ethnic group through non-violent means. It accuses the government of “abducting” Kanu abroad in violation of international law.

Twitter officials last met with representatives of the Nigerian government “about a week ago,” according to Mohammed. “It’s been quite encouraging.

By Annmarie Hordern and William Clowes

Bloomberg