“In view of the emerging security situation, I have decided to declare a nationwide security emergency and order additional recruitment into the Armed Forces,” Tinubu said. He has also ordered a redeployment of police VIP bodyguards to core policing duties, and the hiring of another 50,000 new police recruits.
Nigerian security forces are also battling a 16-year jihadist insurgency raging in the northeast.
The first mass abduction to shock Nigeria and the world was in 2014 when the jihadist group Boko Haram kidnapped 276 teenage girls in Chibok, in the northeast, sparking an international outcry.
Since then thousands of kidnappings have occurred – most of them by criminal gangs that are after money and have no ideological leanings, but whose increasing alliance with jihadists from the northeast, is giving authorities headaches. Some of the kidnappings go unreported.
This week police received a report “that suspected armed men abducted about 10 persons” from villages in Shiroro local government area, although local media said 24 farmers were taken.
Efforts were under way to rescue the victims, police said.
Details under which hostages are released are rarely released, but a report by Lagos-based security advisory said Nigeria’s kidnap-for-ransom crisis has “consolidated into a structured, profit-seeking industry” where millions of dollars have exchanged hands.
Assailants prey on people congregated in large groups including schools and religious places.
Recent raids have resulted in 25 schoolgirls, 38 worshippers, 315 school children and teachers, 13 young women and girls walking near a farm, and another 10 women and children, snatched – across various parts of the country.
The resurgence of mass kidnappings in Nigeria comes as US President Donald Trump threatened military action in Nigeria to stop what he calls the killing of Christians by radical Islamists.
- Agence France-Presse
