Nigerian troops have freed more than 800 people held by Boko Haram militants in multiple villages in the country’s restive northeast, the Nigerian army said on Thursday.
All the hostages were rescued in Borno state, with 520 recovered in Kusumma Village on Tuesday after a confrontation with Boko Haram fighters and a further 309 from 11 other villages under the Muslim group’s control.
“The gallant troops cleared the remnants of the Boko Haram terrorists hibernating in Kala Balge general area,” army spokesman Sani Usman said in a statement, adding that 22 “terrorists” were killed.
Three militants were killed and one was captured alive during the second raid on the 11 villages, he said.
Usman said items recovered included arms, axes and a motorcycle.
The military operations came on the same day that Boko Haram abducted 16 women, including two girls, in Adamawa state.
“We received report of the kidnap of 14 women and two girls by gunmen believed to be Boko Haram insurgents near Sabon Garin Madagali Village,” Adamawa state police spokesman Othman Abubakar said.
Locals said the hostages were seized in the bush while fetching firewood or fishing in a nearby river under the escort of two civilian vigilantes assisting the military against Boko Haram.
“When the civilian vigilantes escorting the women saw the heavily armed Boko Haram fighters advancing on them, they fled, leaving the women to their fate,” Madagali resident Garba Barnabas said.
Two women who escaped by jumping into the river and pretending to have drowned later returned to the village to raise the alarm, he added.
Human-rights groups have said fighters have kidnapped thousands of women and young girls, including more than 200 schoolgirls who were abducted from the Borno town of Chibok nearly two years ago.
At least 17,000 have been killed since Boko Haram launched an insurgency in 2009 in a bid to carve out an Islamic state in northeast Nigeria.
More than 2.6 million people have fled their homes since the start of the violence, but some of the internally displaced have returned home after troops began a fightback last year and recaptured territory.
A regional force involving troops from Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Benin is to deploy to fight the militants.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees