KADUNA, Nigeria – The rescue kidnapping business is booming across northern Nigeria, and schoolchildren are its hottest commodity.
Just before midnight on March 11, armed men broke into a school about 300 meters from a military training college in Kaduna State and seized dozens of students from their dormitories. It took less than 12 hours for the captors to issue a demand now familiar, through a grainy video posted on Facebook.
“They want 500 million Naira,” said one of the terrified hostages at the Federal Forestry College, sitting shirtless in a clearing in the forest, a sum equivalent to about $ 1 million. Masked men wielding Kalashnikovs walked back and forth among the 39 students – most of them young women – and began to beat them with whips.
“Our life is in danger,” shouted a woman. “Just give them what they want.”
On March 13, the Nigerian army foiled an attempt to kidnap another 300 students at a boarding school less than 50 miles away. The next day, the children were among a group of 11 people kidnapped in the city of Suleja, in the state of Niger in Nigeria.