• Jangebe More than 300 girls kidnapped from a school in northwestern Nigeria

  • Special Women as ammunition of war

Hundreds of teenagers kidnapped last Friday from a boarding school in Jangebe, in northeastern Nigeria, were released on Tuesday morning and

are currently on the premises of the Zamfara government

, state governor Bello Matawalle told AFP.

"I am happy to announce that the girls have been released. They have just arrived at the government house and are in good health," he told an AFP journalist who was able to see the young women.

"The total number of girls kidnapped in the school is

279 and they are all before us

; we thank Allah," added the governor.

The authorities initially assured that 317 girls were missing after the attack by armed men on this boarding school in the state of Zamfara in the early hours of Friday.

An AFP journalist could see dozens of young people, with sky blue veils, gathered in the government house.

This is the fourth attack on schools in less than three months in northwestern Nigeria, where criminal groups, called "bandits", have multiplied large-scale thefts of animals and carried out kidnappings for

ransom for a decade

.

The Zamfara authorities have been negotiating with criminal groups for more than a year an

amnesty agreement in exchange for the handover of weapons

.

Those responsible for the state of Zamfara negotiated the release last December of 344 boys who were kidnapped by bandits at a boarding school in the neighboring state of Katsina.

The authorities deny that they pay ransom to the kidnappers, but security experts do not believe it and fear that these practices will lead to the multiplication of kidnappings in these regions undermined by extreme poverty and without security.

This new mass kidnapping rekindled the memory of the Chibok abduction in 2014, when the jihadist group Boko Haram kidnapped 276 students, sparking worldwide outrage.

More than a hundred are still missing and

no one knows how many survived

.

But these two kidnappings are different: the "bandits" act for money and not for ideological reasons, despite the fact that some have forged ties with jihadist groups in the northeast.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • Nigeria

  • Boko haram

  • Kidnappings

  • international

AfricaAn armed group kills a student and kidnaps 42 people in a Nigerian school, most of them students

AfricaMore than 300 female students kidnapped from a school in northwestern Nigeria

27 students kidnapped in Nigeria released

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