Abducted GSS Kankara Students Narrates How He Escaped, As Another 17 Students Found

One of the students of Government Secondary School, Kankara, Katsina State, Usama Aminu who was abducted, but manage to escape, has narrated his ordeal.

Aminu, who has reunited with his family, gave an account of his encounter with the dreaded armed bandits.

He said, “When I decided to run they brought a knife to slaughter me but I ran away quickly,” he said, sitting on a mat and speaking softly as he described how he had been in bed at the all-boys school in Kankara when he heard gunshots on Friday night.

At first, he said, the boys thought the commotion was from soldiers trying to protect them. But the attackers, armed with AK-47 assault rifles, were already in the building, threatening groups who tried to leave their dormitories at the Government Science secondary school in an attack that has outraged Nigerians.

“They said they would kill whoever is trying to escape then I began to run, climbing one rock to another through a forest,” Aminu said.

Many details of the raid and its aftermath remain unknown.

Meanwhile, EDUCARE NEWS gathered from an authoritative source, that 17 students, out of the reported 333 abducted by the arm bandits, have been found, on Monday.

The Nigeria Police said they exchanged fire with the attackers, allowing some students to run for safety.

A spokesman for Katsina state also confirmed that 17 more students had been found on Monday, leaving about 316 students missing.

The president’s office said on Monday the government was in contact with the armed men and was negotiating the release of the boys after security agencies had located them.

“We are making progress and the outlook is positive,” Katsina Governor Aminu Bello Masari told reporters after meeting President Muhammadu Buhari, who was visiting his home state.

The governor said the president was fully committed to the rescue of the schoolchildren, after widespread criticism for not visiting the school.

In a related development, one of the abducted students, 15-year-old, Muhammad Abubakar was another pupil who escaped, trekking through farmland and a forest in the dark. He said he was among 72 boys who had reached safety in the village of Kaikaibise where he ended up.

“The bandits called us back. They told us not to run. We started to walk back to them, but as we did, we saw more people coming towards the dormitory,” he told Reuters.

“So I and others ran again. We jumped over the fence and ran through a forest to the nearest village.”

Abubakar, one of eight children, said he saw a number of boys being rounded up before they were marched out of the school, which has around 800 students. Seven of his friends are missing.

As he was reunited with his mother, who sells firewood for a living, he said: “I never thought I would see my parents again.”

Friday’s raid evoked memories of the 2014 kidnap of more than 200 girls from a school in the northeastern town of Chibok, by Islamist group Boko Haram.

As the Federal government continues to make frantic efforts to rescue the remaining boys of Government Secondary School, Kankara from the hands of the abductors, the parents of these boys will continue to wait in anxiety, as they wait with great expectation, to reunite with their wards.