By Afolabi Sotunde and Seun Sanni
JANGEBE, Nigeria (Reuters) – At one point, Hadiza was crying and throwing her arms around her father for the first time since her abduction; the next – shots and tear gas filled the air and people ran for cover.
It was supposed to be a joyful meeting to end the five-day ordeal of 279 girls kidnapped last week from the Jangebe Government High School for Girls in a remote corner of northwest Nigeria.
Lively children lined the streets as buses brought the girls, smiling and waving, back to school from the state capital of Zamfara, Gusau, where they had been attended since his release on Tuesday. “Thank you thank you!” shouted one.
The relatives huddled around the buses and the parents laughed with joy when they met their daughters, who shouted “Thank God!”.
Less than 40 minutes later, pandemonium broke out.
While government officials in a corridor made long speeches in front of the girls, impatient parents burst in and grabbed their children to take them home.
The employees ran out and soon after, reporters heard gunshots outside the school’s gates.
They saw the police firing tear gas at a group of protesters outside the school and soldiers firing into the air.
At least three people were hit by bullets, but it was unclear by whom.
A Reuters journalist’s video showed hundreds of people fleeing down a side street. Two girls grabbed their hands, bent down – and then ran while the soldiers fired.
Elsewhere, people threw stones at the cars of government officials and reporters who rushed out of the city.
IMPLEMENTATION
The chaos makes clear the desperation of the situation in northwest Nigeria, where banditry has infected for years, making large areas of the region lawless.
The trend of kidnapping children in boarding schools was initiated by the jihadist group Boko Haram, which kidnapped 270 students from the Northeast in 2014, about 100 of whom were never found.
Since then, it has been taken over by gangs of armed criminals looking for ransom; the Jangebe kidnapping was the third kidnapping at a mass school in northern Nigeria since December.
Military and police attempts to fight gangs have met with little success, while many fear that state officials, like that of Zamfara, are making matters worse, allowing kidnappers to go unpunished, paying them or, as in Zamfara, giving them amenities.
President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday called for the kidnappers to be brought to justice.
His national security adviser, Babagana Monguno, said the president had ordered a massive move to Zamfara, banned mining and imposed a no-fly zone in the state.
He said the central government “will not allow this country to fall into bankruptcy”, adding: “We will not be blackmailed”.
(Reporting by Seun Sanni and Afolabi Sotunde in Jangebe; Writing by Paul Carsten; Editing by Kevin Liffey)