Almost 90 people have been kidnapped in northern Nigeria – presumably by criminals who want to extort ransom money. It’s not the first incident. Dozens of people had already been kidnapped last week.
In Nigeria, 87 people have been abducted in several mass kidnappings. The people were kidnapped on Sunday from a village in Kajuru district, northwestern Kaduna state, MP Usman Danlami told the dpa news agency. He represents the district where the kidnappings took place.
The current kidnappings are not the first incident. Just last week, according to Danlami, 75 people were kidnapped from two villages in Kajuru, and a few days earlier 287 girls and boys were kidnapped from a school in the neighboring Chikun district.
Again and again Mass kidnappings
Armed criminal groups are suspected to be behind the wave of kidnappings in Kaduna. In the north and center of Africa’s most populous country with more than 220 million inhabitants, both criminal gangs and Islamist terrorist groups such as Boko Haram repeatedly kidnap people. While the Islamist terrorists make political demands, the gangs are mostly interested in extorting ransom money or securing the release of their imprisoned members.