Gunmen release 10 more Nigerian students after fresh ransom

Gunmen in Nigeria on Sunday freed 10 students abducted in the northwest Kaduna state after collecting a ransom, a school official told The Associated Press.

The Rev. John Hayab said the students were released on Sunday afternoon, nearly three months after they were seized by the gunmen in Kaduna. Their release comes about a week after 10 of their other schoolmates were also released.

Eleven of the 121 students of the Bethel Baptist High School in Kaduna are still being held, Hayab said, expressing frustration at the refusal of the gunmen to release all the students at once.

“If we have the power, we would have brought them,” he told AP when asked why the gunmen held back 11 students. “The bandits are the ones in control, we now have to play along softly and get our children back.”

He was referring to the gunmen who have abducted at least 1,400 schoolchildren in Nigeria in the last year, according to the U.N. children’s agency.

“Our anger is not with the bandits as it is with the government, because we can’t have a government that is supposed to protect us and the bandits are having a field day. There is no day they have ever released one child for free,” the official added.

In the wake of increasing school attacks in the northwest and central parts of Nigeria, some governors have temporarily shut down schools and imposed phone blackouts in their states as they struggle to contain security challenges in Africa’s most populous state.

The first mass school abduction in Nigeria was carried out by the Boko Haram extremist group in 2014. But the West African nation has witnessed more than 10 other attacks on schools in the last year, a sudden spike that authorities have blamed on outnumbered security operatives in remote communities where the affected schools are mostly located.

Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari, who rode to power in 2015 on a wave of goodwill after promising to end the country’s security challenges, has come under growing pressure over the security crisis, especially regarding the gunmen abducting schoolchildren and the Boko Haram extremists.

Security analysts have told the AP the gunmen and the extremists might be working together.

By Chinedu Asadu 

AP 

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At least 329 people killed by cholera in Nigeria's northern state

A cholera outbreak in north Nigeria's Kano state has killed at least 329 people since March, a state government official said on Wednesday.

Addressing a media forum on the cholera outbreak in the state capital Kano city, Sulaiman Iliyasu, a disease surveillance officer in the state, said 11,475 suspected cholera cases were reported across the 44 local government areas of the state since March.

Iliyasu said out of the number, 11,115 cases had fully recovered, while 329 people had died, noting that 31 cases were still receiving treatment from three local government areas of the state as of Tuesday.

The officer said Kano ranked second in the country in terms of the number of cholera cases, adding the state government has established cholera treatment centers and intensified social mobilization and community awareness in the state as part of measures to check the disease.

Cholera is a highly virulent disease characterized in its most severe form by a sudden onset of acute watery diarrhea that can lead to death by severe dehydration.

The outbreak of cholera in Nigeria has remained persistent, occurring annually mostly during the rainy season and more often in areas with poor sanitation, overcrowding, lack of clean food and water, and areas where open defecation is a common practice.

Xinhua

Nigerian court orders alleged separatist freed, lawyer says

A Nigerian court on Thursday ordered the immediate release of a woman held in detention since February accused of being a member of a banned separatist organisation, her lawyer said.

The court in Abuja ruled that the police had illegally detained Ngozi Umeadi and ordered it to pay her damages of 50 million naira ($121,500), lawyer Ejiofor Ifeanyi said.

Nigerian authorities routinely detain people for months or years without charge.

Umeadi was accused of being a member of the Indigenous People of Biafra, which campaigns for the southeastern region to secede. Nigerian authorities blame it for attacks on police stations and other targets and have been cracking down on the group, which denies wrongdoing.

IPOB members and supporters accuse the authorities of arbitrary killings and detentions in the southeast, which they deny.

Ifeanyi also represents IPOB's detained leader, Nnamdi Kanu, who is facing trial for treason.

Kanu disappeared from Nigeria while on bail in 2017 after spending two years in jail. The Nigerian authorities announced in June that he had been captured abroad and brought back for his trial to resume, without explaining the circumstances.

Kanu's family and lawyers have alleged that he was illegally transferred from Kenya to Nigeria. Kenya has denied involvement.

Kanu's detention, and the fact that the authorities failed to produce him in court at the last hearing in July, have fuelled tension in the southeast, where a series of mass "sit-at-home" protests have taken place in solidarity with him.

Amnesty International said in August that Nigerian security forces had killed at least 115 people in the southeast this year and arbitrarily arrested or tortured scores of others. The authorities made no comment on the findings.

The southeast, homeland of the Igbo ethnic group, attempted to secede in 1967 under the name Republic of Biafra, triggering a three-year civil war in which more than a million people died, mostly of starvation.

Reuters

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