Militants
are suspected of having abducted dozens more girls and women in northeastern
Nigeria, news reports said on Tuesday, reviving concerns about hundreds of
schoolgirls who werekidnapped in the same region in April and
have yet to be rescued.
Quoting
witnesses and officials in the area, the reports said that 60 girls and women,
and possibly more than 30 boys, had been seized in the village of Kummabza,
about 100 miles from Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State.
The
Nigerian authorities said that they had yet to confirm the abduction, which was
said to have taken place on Saturday. Witnesses accused militants from the Boko
Haram group, which took responsibility for the abductions in April, of carrying
out the kidnapping after attacks on villages.
Boko
Haram, which has sought to trade hostages in return for its own members
detained by the security forces, has been accused of regular attacks, despite a
military state of emergency in the region.
On
Monday, at least eight people were killed and 20 others wounded by an explosion
on a college campus in Kano, northern Nigeria. It was not immediately known
whether the attack was part of Boko Haram’s campaign to promote an Islamic
state.
Earlier
this month, the group killed scores of people — possibly hundreds, according to
the Nigerian news media — in what local officials described as a massacre in
northeastern Nigeria along the border with Cameroon, which has deployed
thousands of its troops as part of a regional campaign against the group.
No comments:
Post a Comment