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Kankara, Nigeria:
The Boko Haram jihadist group launched a video on Thursday claiming to indicate schoolboys seized in a mass kidnapping in northwest Nigeria final week.
A distraught teenager, talking in English and Hausa within the video seen by AFP, mentioned he was amongst 520 college students taken by “the gang of Abu Shekau.”
The teenager was surrounded by a big group of boys — some wanting very younger — who had been clustered below a tree, showing grubby and exhausted.
The assault final Friday on a rural faculty in Kankara, Katsina state, was initially blamed on criminals, referred to as bandits, who’ve terrorised the area for years.
But on Tuesday Boko Haram claimed accountability for the raid, which occurred a whole bunch of kilometres (miles) from its stronghold in northeast Nigeria — the birthplace of a brutal decade-old insurgency.
The video was launched with a recording of a voice ressembling that of the group’s elusive chief, Abubakar Shekau.
It reiterated the declare of accountability.
“I earlier released an audio confirming our people did God’s work, but people denied it,” the voice mentioned. “Here are my men, and your children have spoken.”
The video was despatched to AFP through the identical channel as earlier messages by Boko Haram.
Security sources instructed AFP Wednesday that the operation was carried out on Boko Haram’s orders by a infamous native gangster known as Awwalun Daudawa, in collaboration with Idi Minorti and Dankarami, two different crime chiefs with robust native followings.
The authorities has not instantly reacted to Boko Haram’s claims, nor confirmed the precise variety of kids lacking.
Two accounts by completely different officers have put the variety of schoolboys at 320 or 333.
Shekau was behind the 2014 abduction of 276 schoolgirls in Chibok that sparked world outrage.
#BringBackOurBoys began trending on social media, in reference to an identical hashtag after the Chibok kidnappings.
Small protests to push for the boys’ launch befell in Katsina in addition to within the capital Abuja on Thursday.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV workers and is printed from a syndicated feed.)
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