Shortly after 8 p.m. Thursday, Aminu Bello Masari, the governor of Katsina state, announced in a television interview that 344 of the boys had been turned over to state authorities in the forest of neighboring Zamfara state, in over one hundred miles from their school in Katsina State.
Other local officials said the boys would meet with President Muhammadu Buhari on Friday.
The jihadist group Boko Haram claimed responsibility for the kidnapping, saying on Tuesday it had seized students of the Kankara government’s high school science school to punish them for “un-Islamic practices.”
Hours before the governor’s announcement Thursday, Boko Haram released a video that purported to show dozens of schoolchildren. In the grainy six-minute video, the hostages said some of their classmates had died while in captivity and begged the government to negotiate their release.
Many details surrounding the kidnapping, in a remote agricultural area with poor communication, remain unclear, including the actual tally of the number of schoolchildren taken away.
Neither Mr. Masari nor the other state governors who hailed the release have offered details of the deal to secure their release.
(More soon)
Write to Joe Parkinson at [email protected]
Copyright © 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
