A new guild of artists from Nigeria’s Benin City has offered to donate artworks to the British Museum in London as a way to encourage it to return the priceless Benin Bronzes that were looted from the city’s royal court by British troops in 1897. Created in the once mighty Kingdom of Benin from at least the 16th century onwards, the bronze and brass sculptures are among Africa’s finest and most culturally significant artifacts.
Nigerian gunmen have freed the remaining pupils from more than 100 kidnapped from an Islamic seminary in northwestern Niger State nearly three months ago. Heavily armed criminals snatched 136 pupils from the seminary in Tegina on May 30 in one of a series of mass abductions targeting schools and colleges in Nigeria since December. Six of the pupils died in captivity and a further 15 escaped in June, according to school officials.
A second young woman abducted seven years ago from the town of Chibok by Boko Haram militants was freed this week, Borno state’s governor has said. The kidnappings of some 270 teenagers in the northeastern town in 2014 sparked an international outcry and a viral campaign on social media with the hashtag #bringbackourgirls. The army handed over Hassana Adamu, along with her two children, to Governor Babagana Zulum on Saturday.
Police and government authorities have secured the release of 100 people, including women, children and nursing mothers, who were kidnapped from their village in northwestern Nigeria over a month ago, a local police spokesperson said. Nigeria is battling an increase in armed robberies and kidnappings for ransom, mainly in northwestern states, where thinly deployed security forces have struggled to contain the rise of armed gangs, commonly referred to as bandits.
Former US president Donald Trump has praised Nigeria’s government for banning Twitter after it deleted President Muhammadu Buhari’s post for breaching its rules. “Who are they to dictate good and evil, if they themselves are evil?” Mr Trump said in a statement. He urged other countries to ban Twitter and Facebook for not allowing “free and open speech”.
Two students who were kidnapped from a university in northern Nigeria last Tuesday have been killed, making it a total of five Greenfield University students killed by their abductors, an official said in a statement released Monday. They were among 20 students and three staff members kidnapped from the Greenfield University in Kaduna, northwest Nigeria, last Tuesday. Kaduna’s State Governor Nasir El-Rufai has been unwavering in his stance against negotiating with the kidnappers.
Up to 65,000 people in northeastern Nigeria have fled their homes after an assault by armed groups on a border town on Wednesday, while attacks that appear to be targeted have forced a temporary halt to aid operations, U.N. agencies said. Local officials and a resident said on Wednesday that at least eight people had been killed in the attack on Damasak by suspected Islamists.
A reunion of kidnapped daughters and their parents in Jangebe, Nigeria, turned violent on Wednesday when armed forces reportedly opened fire. Parents were said to have become frustrated at how long the ceremony was taking and started throwing stones at government officials. The 279 girls were kidnapped by armed men while at school last Friday. They were then freed on Tuesday.
Hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls abducted last week from a boarding school in the northwestern Zamfara state have been released, the state’s governor said Tuesday. Gunmen abducted the girls from the Government Girls Junior Secondary School in Jangebe town on Friday, in the latest in a series of mass kidnappings of students in the west African nation.
Unidentified gunmen kidnapped 317 schoolgirls from the town of Jangebe in northwest Nigeria on Friday, police said, the second such kidnapping in little over a week. A surge in armed militancy has led to a breakdown of security in the north of Africa’s most populous country, where school kidnappings are becoming endemic. The rise in abductions is fuelled in part by sizeable government payoffs in exchange for the children, officials have said.