Nigeria's government has labelled criminal gangs as “terrorist” organisations. The gangs are blamed for mass kidnappings. Earlier this week, soldiers rescued 97 hostages, who were abducted more than two months ago. The classification will lead to harsher penalties.
Nigeria President Muhammadu Buhari on Friday signed the 2022 Appropriation Bill titled “Budget of Economic Growth and Sustainability” into law at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.
Nearly 100 hostages, most of them women and children, have been rescued more than two months after they were abducted by armed groups in northwest Nigeria.
Among the 97 freed hostages were 19 babies and more than a dozen children, Ayuba Elkana, police chief in Zamfara state, said on Tuesday.
Mostly barefooted, weary and in worn-out clothes, the ex-captives trickled out of the buses that took them to Gusau, capital of Zamfara state. Women with malnourished-looking babies strapped to their backs trailed behind.
Coming a few days after 21 schoolchildren were freed by security forces, the rescue brought a sigh of relief in Nigeria where armed groups have killed thousands and kidnapped many residents and travellers in exchange for ransoms.
Police said the hostages were “rescued unconditionally” on Monday in joint security operations targeting the camps of armed groups that have been terrorising remote communities across the north-west and centre of Africa’s most populous country.
They had been abducted from their homes and along highways in remote communities in Zamfara and neighbouring Sokoto state.
The hostages had slept on the ground in abandoned forest reserves that serve as hideouts for the gunmen. The first batch of 68 “were in captivity for over three months and they include 33 male adults, seven male children, three female children and 25 women including pregnant/nursing mothers respectively,” Elkana said.
Another set of 29 victims were also rescued “unconditionally” in Kunchin Kalgo forest in the Tsafe local government area of Zamfara, police said.
It is not clear if ransoms were paid for the releases as is usually the case in many remote communities in Nigeria’s troubled north. Authorities have said the hostages’ freedom was the result of military operations including airstrikes.
The large bands of assailants are mostly young men from the Fulani ethnic group, who had traditionally worked as nomadic cattle herders and are caught up in a decades-long conflict with Hausa farming communities over access to water and grazing land.
Nigerian Army authorities have said 22 terrorists were killed when troops of the Multinational Joint Task Force engaged Boko Haram and ISWAP terrorists around Mallam Fatori Town in the Lake Chad region. They, however, added that six soldiers were also killed during the engagement.
Nigeria’s presidency says dozens of people have been killed in violence between farmers and herders in the country’s central Nasarawa state.
In a statement late on Tuesday, the office of President Muhammadu Buhari said at least 45 farmers were killed in the violence that erupted on Friday. Dozens more were wounded, it said.
Buhari “expressed grief over the heart-wrenching” killings and said his government would “leave no stone unturned in fishing out the perpetrators of this senseless and barbaric incident, and bring them to justice”.
Local police said the violence broke out when armed Fulani herders attacked villagers from the Tiv ethnic group over the killing of a kinsman that they blamed on Tiv farmers. The unrest continued until Sunday. The police initially gave a death toll of eight.
Nasarawa state police spokesman Ramhan Nansel earlier said military and police teams had deployed in the area to restore calm and arrest the perpetrators.
“We received a complaint on the killing of a Fulani herdsman but while the investigation was ongoing, a reprisal attack was carried out in Hangara village and neighbouring Kwayero village,” Ramhan Nansel,
“Eight people were killed in the attacks and their bodies were recovered by the police and taken to hospital.”
But Peter Ahemba of the Tiv Development Association said the death toll was higher.
“We recovered more than 20 corpses of our people killed in the attacks in 12 villages across Lafia, Obi and Awe districts where around 5,000 were displaced,” he said, adding that many people were still missing.
Deadly clashes between nomadic cattle herders and local farmers over grazing and water rights are common in central Nigeria.
The internecine conflict has taken on an ethnic and religious dimension in recent years. The Fulani herders are Muslim, and the farmers are primarily Christian.
The friction, which has roots dating back more than a century, was caused by droughts, population growth, the expansion of sedentary farming into communal areas as well as poor governance.
Violence by criminal gangs of cattle thieves among the herders, who raid villages, killing and burning homes after looting them, has compounded the situation.
The Governor of Nasarawa State, Abdullahi Sule, has promised to go after killers of Fulani herders and Tiv farmers.
“There was needless loss of lives of our citizens. Such act of violence is most unfortunate, condemnable, and unacceptable and will not be condoned by this administration,” he was quoted as saying by the Sahara Reporters news site.
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