DM Monitoring
KATSINA, (Nigeria): Dozens of schoolboys who were rescued from kidnappers in northwest Nigeria arrived back home on Friday, many of them barefoot and clutching blankets.
Television pictures showed the boys dressed in dusty clothes, looking weary but otherwise well, getting off buses in the city of Katsina and walking to a government building.
One of them, with flecks of dried mud on his face, told Channels TV the captors had fed them bread and cassava.
“It was cold,” he told the reporter. Asked how he had felt when the bus arrived in Katsina, he said: “I was really happy,” and broke into a smile.
“We are very grateful. We are very grateful. We are very grateful,” a man who said he was the father of two of the boys told the Arise television station.
A week earlier, gunmen on motorbikes raided the boys’ boarding school in the nearby town of Kankara and marched hundreds of them into the vast Rugu forest. Authorities said security services rescued them on Thursday, although it was not clear if all of them had been recovered.
The abduction gripped a country already incensed by widespread insecurity, and evoked memories of Islamist militant group Boko Haram’s 2014 kidnapping of more than 270 schoolgirls in the northeastern town of Chibok.
