The hunt for 24 missing girl students in Nigeria is going on with intensified efforts to rescue them from the ‘bandits' custody, officials said. Nigerian security forces have been put on high alert after the country’s information minister said that the nation was facing an uncomfortable spotlight on its security situation.
The armed forces are still searching for 24 other girls after one abducted managed to escape the ‘bandits’ custody on Wednesday, the authorities said.
In a separate attack on a church in western Nigeria, gunmen killed two people during a service that was recorded and broadcast online. Both cases of violence and abduction came a month after US President Donald Trump threatened to launch military action against the criminal gangs currently targeting the Christian population in the country.
In a strongly worded response, President Bola Tinubu "has put our nation's security apparatus on the highest alert ever and has deployed to actively pursue and eliminate terrorists, bandits and criminal elements wherever they may be in Nigeria.
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“There will be no remorse or leniency towards these criminals; we will hunt and bury them in the ground,” the Nigerian information minister, Mohammad Idris, said.
"We'll use every instrument of the state to bring these girls home and ensure that the perpetrators of this wickedness pay the full weight of justice," he told an assembly in the presence of the state governor, according to the latest statement from the minister. Africa's most populous country is divided between a predominantly Christian south and a Muslim-majority north. State police said the abducted children in the recent secondary school attack were all Muslim.
The gangs, known locally as bandits, loot villages while ransoming, kidnapping and killing residents across the north of Nigeria. They regularly target churches and mosques.
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