On a Thursday morning on this date last year, armed men from the bandit family of Yellow Janbros stormed Kuriga town in Chikun LGA, Kaduna State, and herded students from their classrooms into the forest. News quickly spread on local and international platforms that terrorists had kidnapped more than 200 students before officials later gave the figure as 137.
As the incident marks a year today, PREMIUM TIMES revisits the events that led to the abduction, the group involved and how the students were rescued.
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One of the big terrorists indirectly involved in the incident has been killed in a joint operation.
Our reporter exclusively reported that the bandit family of Yellow Janbros, led by their son [also called Janbros], masterminded the abduction. But because of his inexperience in such abductions, it almost failed until he contracted the notorious Dogo Gide to fight the military operatives trailing them and the abducted students into the forest.
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About 300 students had just finished their morning assembly when they marched into their classrooms at the joint primary and secondary sections of the Local Government Education Authority School in Kuriga.
“The number of the kidnapped from the secondary section based on the statistics we took together with the parents is 187,” a home economics teacher in the school, Sani Abdullahi, told Reuters a few hours after the abduction. He added that 40 pupils were taken from the primary section.
This newspaper understands that the school authority was uncertain about the number of students kidnapped that day. It later agrees with the estimates given by the state government.
The students were released after 17 days in captivity.
“All of them have come back home safely,” Kaduna State Governor Uba Sani said in a broadcast by Channels Television.
When asked about the actual figure, Mr Sani said: “As the leader, I shouldn’t bother myself about figures. What is more important is the return of the children.”
Nearly 1,500 students have been kidnapped from their schools in Nigeria since 2014 when Boko Haram, under the leadership of idiosyncratic Abubakar Shekau, kidnapped more than 200 girls in Chibok, a town in Borno State.
Some of those students are still in captivity, married off to Boko Haram commanders. After that, a Boko Haram faction operating between North-west and North-central Nigeria has joined forces with criminal bandits to carry out other school abductions.
Before the men came
Terror activities around Kuriga forced the authorities to move a police post in the town to another town, Buruku.
Apart from wanton attacks on its surrounding villages, Kuriga has suffered a series of terror attacks and abductions since 2018, with at least three deaths and 30 abductions, according to data we collected from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) last year.
The town and other ransacked remote communities have paid more than N150 million as levies to the terrorists, a resident who pleaded anonymity for security reasons told our reporter a few days after the abduction.
“In 2018, we had to sell our old transformer and water pumping machine [provided by the government] to raise N15 million for the terrorists,” he revealed, adding that farming activities have also been threatened after many farmers were forced to pay protection and access levies.
The situation became unbearable for the residents of Kuriga, who formed a volunteer vigilante to confront the terrorists.
The vigilantes protected the community with locally-made guns and torchlights until the infamous 7 March 2024 daylight attack.
A day before the school abduction, the terrorists had attacked a small village near Kuriga. Upon hearing their presence in the village, Kuriga men spent the whole night monitoring the movement of the terrorists.
7 March 2024: A case of life and death
Saving the students from the terrorists that day was a case of life and death, according to some armed volunteers who watched helplessly as the students were led into the forest.
The terrorists arrived in the morning, a change of strategy that startled Kuriga residents.
“Our men were sleeping when they came,” Haruna Husseini, one of the volunteers, recalled. “The women raised the alarm, and some of us woke up and picked up our guns.”
“But we could not do anything that day,” he continued. “Many students would have died that day if we had engaged the bandits in a gunfight because the bullets we use spread around even though you point your gun towards a target.”
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Abduction transformed Kuriga
Since the unfortunate abduction, Kuriga, a little-known town in the terror-ravaged Chikun LGA, has become popular, attracting the attention of agencies like the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
In collaboration with the Kaduna State government, UNICEF has revamped the town’s education infrastructure. The dilapidated school where the students were kidnapped has now been renovated.
The school has been open since the beginning of the year. Locals said security forces have also been deployed to the community, assuring them of their safety.
