Pascal Arogorn Ibe
Gunmen have attacked a private university in Kaduna State on Tuesday night, abducting an unspecified number of students.
The academic institution, Greenfield University, is located along the Kaduna–Abuja Highway in Chikun Local Government Area, and also the first private university in the state established three years ago.
The latest incident is the first major attack that bandits will launch on communities around the Kaduna-Abuja Highway since 300 female soldiers were deployed to the general area in January this year.
The Kaduna State Commissioner for Internal Security and Home Affairs, Samuel Aruwan, confirmed the incident to Channels Television.
However, eyewitnesses, said the gunmen stormed the university last night and started shooting sporadically, before taking some of the students away.
The locals said that the university with about forty students population does not have enough security on the ground, despite being located in one of the epicentres of kidnapping, a situation which they believe made it easier for the bandits to gain easy access into the institution.
In recent time, Kaduna has been facing series of attacks by bandits including assaults on schools.
On March 11th, they attacked the Federal College of Forestry Mechanization Afaka in the Igabi Local Government Area of the state and kidnapped 39 students.
While ten out of the number have been released, the fate of the remaining ones still hangs in the balance.
Governor Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna State has repeatedly insisted his government will not pay ransom to the kidnappers despite pleas by the parents of the abducted students.
The former minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) believes the renewed attacks on the northwestern state is due to his government’s stance that it would not negotiate with bandits.
“We will not give them any money and they will not make any profit from Kaduna; anyone that comes to Kaduna will not get a penny from the state government, except he will get a bullet instead,” the governor added when he spoke in an interview on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics on April 4th.
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