Gunmen attacked a town in the northern Nigerian province of Kaduna and grabbed 18 inhabitants including seven youngsters, a local area leader said on Tuesday, the most recent in a rash of mass kidnappings disturbing each part of life in the district.
Groups of bandits kidnapping for ransom have been abducting kids from their schools, locals from their homes, and travelers from their vehicles across northwest Nigeria since last December.
Mallam Suleiman Keke, a local area leader in the town of Keke B on the edges of the state capital Kaduna, said gunmen on motorbikes showed up late at night on Monday and went from one house to other abducting youngsters and their folks.
“It was an unnerving encounter for us,” he said, adding that the criminals had not yet sent a ransom demand.
A representative for the police in Kaduna State declined comments.
Kaduna is among a few states that have embraced measures to attempt to control the assaults, for example, forbidding the sale of fuel in jerry cans and the transport of firewood in trucks to stop armed gangs who travel by motorbike and camp in far off regions.
In Zamfara State, farther toward the northwest, authorities have requested a broadcast communications power outage while the military attempts to overpower the gangs.
Schools in the regions have been closed while a lot of kids have exited school because of a paranoid fear of being abducted, and at times live-in schools have been requested to transform themselves into day schools, with students quickly reassigned starting with one school then onto the next.
Food is frequently difficult to find, to a limited extent since farmers can’t go to their farms in far off regions inspired by a paranoid fear of the gangs, while families are being kept separated in light of the fact that individuals are afraid to travel by road to see family members.
