Wednesday, April 7, 2021

Nigeria army finds five kidnapped students

Nigerian soldiers have found five of the dozens of students kidnapped last month from their college in the country’s northwest, state officials said on Monday.

Dozens of gunmen last month seized 39 students from their hostels in the Federal College of Forestry Mechanization in Afaka in Kaduna state, after a gunfight with soldiers.

It was the latest mass kidnapping in the country’s northwest, where criminal gangs have been increasingly abducting students for ransom, raiding villages, pillaging and stealing cattle.

“The Nigerian military has informed the Kaduna State Government that five of the many kidnapped students of the Federal College of Forestry Mechanization, Afaka, Kaduna, were recovered this afternoon,” Samuel Aruwan, Kaduna state internal security commissioner, said in a statement.

Aruwan did not give details about how they were found but said they were undergoing medical checks at a military base.

The kidnap gang has previously released videos showing the distraught students being whipped and calling on the government to secure their release.

On Sunday, Aruwan had warned Kaduna authorities will prosecute anyone who negotiates with the kidnappers of the missing students as parents called for their rescue.

Aruwan ruled out negotiations and ransom payments to the kidnappers, warning that “any person who claims to do so in any capacity if found, will be prosecuted accordingly.”

He said the announcement was prompted by media reports that the state government had appointed “representatives to interface with bandits on its behalf”.

“The Kaduna State Government hereby clarifies firmly that such intermediaries have never been appointed.”

On Monday, parents of the kidnapped students, who have formed a support group, issued a statement condemning the state government’s “insensitivity” over the negotiations threat.

“For us, the statement is unfortunate and another demonstration of callousness on the part of the government,” Sam Kambai, the group’s head, said in the statement.

“We can never abandon our children and we will do whatever we can to see that we get them back.”

Kambai said the father of one of the kidnapped students died of shock after learning that his daughter was abducted. Local media have named the individual as Ibrahim Shamaki.

“We do not want to lose more parents… we will not resign to fate by doing nothing,” Kambai said.

On March 22 parents and colleagues of the kidnapped students held a protest outside the school where they blocked a highway and disrupted traffic for hours.

Heavily armed gangs have recently turned their focus to schools, where they kidnap students or schoolchildren for ransom — the Afaka mass abduction was at least the fourth such attack since December.

AFP

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At least 50 killed in suspected cholera outbreak in Nigeria

At least 50 people have been killed in a suspected cholera outbreak this year in Nigeria, local health authorities confirmed Tuesday.

Some eight states across the country had reported the suspected cholera outbreak, said the Nigeria Center for Disease Control (NCDC), which is currently monitoring the situation and coordinating the national response.

“As of March 28, a total of 1,746 suspected cases including 50 deaths with a case fatality rate that is 2.9 percent have been reported,” Chikwe Ihekweazu, head of the NCDC, told reporters in Abuja.

So far, states including Nasarawa, Sokoto, Kogi, Bayelsa, Gombe, Zamfara, Delta and Benue have reported the suspected cholera cases, Ihekweazu said.

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.

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 common practice.

On November 20, 2019, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari signed an executive order committed to ending open defecation throughout the country by 2025 in consonance with the commitment to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Whilst signing the document, Buhari also declared a state of emergency on Nigeria’s water supply, sanitation and hygiene sector, saying the action will reduce the high prevalence of water-borne diseases which caused preventable deaths in different parts of the country.

In 2018 alone, the NCDC confirmed more than 16,000 cholera-related cases across the country.

Xinhua

More Than 1,800 Prisoners Are Broken Out of Jail in Nigeria

The Nigerian authorities say they are searching for about 1,800 inmates who escaped from a prison aided by heavily armed gunmen in the southeastern corner of the country, where anti-government separatists have long been active.

The authorities laid blame for the jailbreak on a rebel group that promotes the decades-old cause of secession for Nigeria’s southeastern corner, popularly known as Biafra.

“All is not well in the southeast,” said Emeka Umeagbalasi, a criminologist at the International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law in Nigeria, a good-governance advocacy group.

The escapes came as security has been declining in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, where kidnapping has become rife and the army has been deployed to respond to security threats, including terrorism and banditry, in almost every state.

Prison officials said that early on Monday morning, men armed with high-powered weapons including machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades arrived at a prison in Owerri, in southeastern Imo State. They exchanged fire with security personnel, according to prison officials, and then used explosives to blast their way into the prison yard.

One inmate died in the stampede that followed, officials said, and one police officer sustained a minor bullet wound to the shoulder. Officers repelled an attack on the armory at the prison, according to Frank Mba, a police spokesman.

Nigeria’s security services have launched a search operation to recapture the inmates, whose number was put at 1,844. It is not yet known how many of them were convicts and how many were just awaiting trial. Justice is often slow in Nigeria, with people spending years in jail before their cases are heard.

“I am worried that some criminals were set free,” said Kelechi Njoku, a hotelier and resident of Owerri whose hotel is about five miles from the prison. “But not all of them are criminals. There are thousands awaiting trials.”

A few prisoners were trickling back into custody, accompanied by their relatives or lawyers, Francis Enobore, a spokesman for the prison system in Nigeria, said in a WhatsApp exchange. Thirty-five inmates refused to leave when the jailbreak happened, he said.

The police said that the attackers were members of the Indigenous People of Biafra, a secessionist group that has been banned in Nigeria since 2017 and is designated as a “militant terrorist organization” by the government.

But a spokesman for the Indigenous People of Biafra denied that the group — or its paramilitary wing, the Eastern Security Network — were involved.

“E.S.N. is in the bush chasing terrorists and have no business with the said attacks,” the spokesman, Emma Powerful, said in a statement. “It is not our mandate to attack security personnel or prison facilities.”

Escaped inmates who return voluntarily will not be charged with unlawful escape, the minister of interior, Rauf Aregbesola, said on a visit to the prison. Prison officials said in a statement that they were “appealing to the good citizens of Imo State and indeed Nigerians to volunteer useful intelligence that will facilitate the recovery effort.”

They said all officers at other prisons should “remain vigilant at this trying moment in our history,” suggesting concern about further prison breaks.

Visiting the prison on Tuesday, Nigeria’s inspector-general of police, Mohammed Adamu, took a belligerent tone, instructing his officers to “never spare” bandits, in an apparent reference to the gunmen who attacked the prison.

“Deal with them ruthlessly,” local journalists reported Mr. Adamu as saying. “Unleash your full arsenal on them. The law is behind you.”

But while he was visiting Owerri, Mr. Adamu was fired as police chief by the Nigerian president, Muhammadu Buhari. It was a month before his tenure was set to end, and the reasons for the dismissal were unclear.

It has been 51 years since the end of the Nigerian civil war in which people of the eastern region broke away from the rest of the country. Biafra, the state they created, came to an end when its leaders surrendered after 30 months of fighting.

But the Biafran dream is alive and well.

It is nurtured by Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, a populist figure who peddles conspiracy theories — including one that the Nigerian president died and was replaced by a body double. Nevertheless, Mr. Kanu has managed to amass a huge following.

Biafra’s enduring popularity — and the group’s — is attributable in part to the rampant police abuses that a generation of Nigerians rose up against last fall, under the banner of the #EndSARS movement.

Young people in southeastern states have for years complained of arbitrary arrests, torture and killings at the hands of the security forces, who are usually drawn from other regions of Nigeria. Convinced that Biafra should be a separate country, many residents of the southeast say the heavy military presence in the region is reminiscent of an occupying foreign army.

The prison break is part of a pattern of attacks on national security forces. Six police stations were razed and 10 police officers killed in the southeast by gunmen over two weeks starting in late February, according to local media reports.

“With the way things are going, in two years’ time Nigeria may be able to play host to 30 to 40 insurgency groups, because government is pushing the people to the wall,” said Mr. Umeagbalasi, the criminologist.

By Ben Ezeamalu and Ruth Maclean

The New York Times

Nigeria receives 100,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines from India

Nigeria has received 100,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines from India, a senior official has said.

This will further boost the number of Nigerians to be vaccinated, Boss Mustapha, chairman of the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 and secretary of the government of the federation, told reporters at a press briefing in Abuja on Tuesday.

The "Covishield" is the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines manufactured by the Serum Institute of India.

The frontline medical personnel, strategic leadership, and those above the age of 50 years across the nation would be vaccinated first.

As of Monday, a total of 963,802 persons in Nigeria had received the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

"The objective is to vaccinate 70 percent of Nigeria's population between 2021 and 2022," he said.

The country has recorded a total of 163,388 confirmed COVID-19 cases with 2,058 deaths, and 153,630 have recovered as of Tuesday night, according to data from the Nigeria Center for Disease Control.

Xinhua

Friday, April 2, 2021

Nigerian air force jet goes missing

A Nigerian air force jet supporting ground troops fighting Boko Haram terrorists in northeast Borno city went missing, an official said on Thursday.

“The loss of radar contact occurred at about 5.08 p.m. [1608GMT] on 31 March 2021,” Edward Gabkwet, spokesman of the Nigerian Airforce, said in a statement.

The Alpha fighter jet was part of ongoing counter-insurgency operations in the North East region which has been ravaged by constant attacks by Boko Haram insurgents.

“Details of the whereabouts of the aircraft or likely cause of contact loss are still sketchy but will be relayed to the general public as soon as they become clear,” Gabkwet said.

The statement confirmed that search and rescue efforts are ongoing.

This incident comes a month after a Nigerian Airforce aircraft crashed at the Nigerian Airforce aircraft — killing all seven personnel on board.

CGTN