PAPIRI: Several parents of the over 300 schoolchildren seized by armed men in the latest mass abduction in Nigeria tell The Associated Press the government has told them nothing about rescue efforts and the stress has been so high that one parent has died of a heart attack.
“Nobody from the government has briefed us about the abduction,” said Emmanuel Ejeh, whose 12-year-old son was taken from the Catholic school in Niger state.
Meanwhile, Nigerian President Bola Tinubu said Wednesday in a statement that he has declared a nationwide security emergency and ordered additional recruitment into the army and police.
No armed group has claimed responsibility for Friday’s abduction of 303 children from the remote community of Papiri, the latest in a series of high-profile seizures in search of ransom. Fifty of the students have since escaped.
The rise in mass abductions from schools comes as the Trump administration pressures Nigeria to act against what it calls the persecution of Christians there — a claim Nigeria’s government denies. Such abductions had decreased in the past two years.
Experts say Muslims suffer just as much or more from the attacks by bandits and militants linked to Al-Qaeda or the Daesh group.
Nigeria’s government has few answers
Parents have gathered at the dusty school compound in Papiri, attempting to comfort each other. Ejeh said his wife fainted after hearing their son was taken.
“It is painful,” Ejeh said. “Mathew is a very kind boy who dreams of becoming a football player. He is after football day and night.”
Two parents of abducted children have died, one of a heart attack, said the bishop of Kontagora diocese, Rev. Bulus Dauwa Yohanna, who also runs the school.
A spokesperson for Nigeria’s presidency, Bayo Onanuga, did not directly address parents’ allegations of being left in the dark. Onanuga told the AP on Wednesday that the military is mounting pressure on the gunmen to release the children.
Nigerian authorities have said helicopters and ground troops have been deployed. Military personnel mingled with anxious parents this week.
The attack came days after gunmen seized 25 students in nearby Kebbi state. All have been rescued, Nigerian authorities said on Tuesday. On Wednesday, police said the students had been reunited with their families.
An AP tally shows that at least 1,799 students have been abducted in a dozen of the largest attacks in Nigeria starting with the seizure of 276 schoolgirls in the village of Chibok by Boko Haram militants, an attack that sparked global outrage.
Some students escape. Others are rescued. Some are never seen again.
“The police will recruit an additional 20,000 officers, bringing the total to 50,000,” the statement read. “My fellow Nigerians, this is a national emergency, and we are responding by deploying more boots on the ground, especially in security-challenged areas,” it added.
Some abducted students have health issues
When Yohanna Yakubu, a church pastor, heard his daughter Mercy was among the 12 teachers also taken in the Papiri attack, he ran to the school. Other agonized parents were already there.
“I went straight to her room (at the dormitory) and saw that the window was broken,” Yakubu said. He called the lack of information from authorities frustrating.
These days he sits in silence, worry creasing his face.
Danteni Mathew’s three children were abducted, but one escaped. He worries about the health of his youngest, who remains missing.
“Yahaya was not healthy before his abduction from the school as he is still battling with hepatitis C,” Mathew said.
School safety training had been promised
Under international scrutiny after the Chibok mass abduction, Nigeria’s government initiated a Safe School Initiative with plans to involve military assets and train staff to improve safety at schools. Soldiers in some cases are stationed at schools considered vulnerable.
It was not immediately clear whether the Papiri school had received that training.
Activists and others assert that little has been done.
UNICEF last year said just 37 percent of schools across 10 states in Nigeria’s volatile north have early-warning systems to detect threats.
“The fact is that Nigerian lives do not matter to the Nigerian government, and what matters to the Nigerian government is how good they look, so they are more focused on propaganda,” said Aisha Yesufu, who helped found the Bring Back Our Girls movement after the Chibok abduction.
Analysts say armed gangs are spreading
Analysts say armed gangs often target schools for abductions because of the pressure they put on the government to negotiate ransoms.
The West African nation is battling dozens of armed groups operating in remote communities with limited government and security presence.
The crisis has become more complex as groups from other parts of the vast Sahel region have joined Boko Haram factions in trying to establish their presence in northern Nigeria, said James Barnett, a research fellow with the US-based Hudson Institute.
“Both bandits and jihadists can have similar interests in conducting these sorts of mass abductions,” he said.
Nigerian parents say they are kept in the dark over abducted schoolchildren
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Nigerian parents say they are kept in the dark over abducted schoolchildren
- No armed group has claimed responsibility for Friday’s abduction of 303 children from the remote community of Papiri, the latest in a series of high-profile seizures in search of ransom
Thousands rally against immigration enforcement in subzero Minnesota temperatures
- Protesters have gathered daily in the Twin Cities since Jan. 7, when 37-year-old mother of three Renee Good was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer
MINNEAPOLIS: Police arrested about 100 clergy demonstrating against immigration enforcement at Minnesota’s largest airport Friday, and thousands gathered in downtown Minneapolis despite Arctic temperatures to protest the Trump administration’s crackdown.
The protests are part of a broader movement against President Donald Trump’s increased immigration enforcement across the state, with labor unions, progressive organizations and clergy urging Minnesotans to stay away from work, school and even shops. The faith leaders gathered at the airport to protest deportation flights and urge airlines to call for an end to to what the Department of Homeland Security has called its largest-ever immigration enforcement operation.
The clergy were issued misdemeanor citations of trespassing and failure to comply with a peace officer and were then released, said Jeff Lea, a Metropolitan Airports Commission spokesman. They were arrested outside the main terminal at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport because they went beyond the reach of their permit for demonstrating and disrupted airline operations, he said.
Rev. Mariah Furness Tollgaard of Hamline Church in St. Paul said police ordered them to leave but she and others decided to stay and be arrested to show support for migrants, including members of her congregation who are afraid to leave their homes. She planned to go back to her church after her brief detention to hold a prayer vigil.
“We cannot abide living under this federal occupation of Minnesota,” Tollgaard said.
Protesters demand ICE leave Minnesota
The Rev. Elizabeth Barish Browne traveled from Cheyenne, Wyoming, to participate in the rally in downtown Minneapolis, where the high temperature was minus 9 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 23 degrees Celsius) despite a bright sun.
“What’s happening here is clearly immoral,” the Unitarian Universalist minister said. “It’s definitely chilly, but the kind of ice that’s dangerous to us is not the weather.”
Protesters have gathered daily in the Twin Cities since Jan. 7, when 37-year-old mother of three Renee Good was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer. Federal law enforcement officers have repeatedly squared off with community members and activists who track their movements.
Sam Nelson said he skipped work so he could join the march. He said he’s a former student of the Minneapolis high school where federal agents detained someone after class earlier this month. That arrest led to altercations between federal officers and bystanders.
“It’s my community,” Nelson said. “Like everyone else, I don’t want ICE on our streets.”
Organizers said Friday morning that more than 700 businesses statewide have closed in solidarity with the movement, from a bookstore in tiny Grand Marais near the Canadian border to the landmark Guthrie Theater in downtown Minneapolis.
“We’re achieving something historic,” said Kate Havelin of Indivisible Twin Cities, one of the more than 100 participating groups.
Detention of a 2-year-old and a 5-year-old
A 2-year-old was reunited with her mother Friday, a day after she was detained with her father outside of their home in South Minneapolis, lawyer Irina Vaynerman told The Associated Press.
Vaynerman said they had quickly challenged the family’s detention in federal court. The petition states that the child, a citizen of Ecuador, was brought to the US as a newborn. The child and her father, Elvis Tipan Echeverria, both have a pending asylum application and neither are subject to final orders of removal.
A US district judge on Thursday had barred the government from transferring the toddler out of state, but she and her father were on a commercial flight to Texas about 20 minutes later, according to court filings. They were flown back Friday.
Agents arrested Tipan Echeverria during a targeted operation, according to a DHS statement said. DHS said the child’s mother was in the area but refused to take the child.
Vaynerman rejected that explanation, saying Tipan Echeverria was “not allowed” to bring his 2-year-old to her mother inside their home.
DHS repeated its allegation Friday that the father of 5-year-old Liam Ramos abandoned him during his arrest by immigration officers in Columbia Heights on Tuesday, leading to the child being detained, too.
Department spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said Liam was detained because his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, “fled from the scene.” The two are detained together at the Dilley Detention Center in Texas, which is intended to hold families. McLaughlin said officers tried to get Liam’s mother to take him, but she refused to accept custody.
The family’s attorney Marc Prokosch said he thinks the mother refused to open the door to the ICE officers because she was afraid she would be detained. Columbia Heights district superintendent Zena Stenvik said Liam was “used as bait.”
Prokosch found nothing in state records to suggest Liam’s father has a criminal history.
On Friday, Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino sought to shift the narrative away from Liam’s detention by attacking the news media for, in his view, insufficient coverage of children who have lost parents to violence by people in the country illegally. After briefly mentioning the 5-year-old during a news conference, he talked about a mother of five who was killed in August 2023.
Details from Good’s autopsy
The Hennepin County Medical Examiner posted an initial autopsy report online for Good that classified her death as a homicide and determined she died from “multiple gunshots wounds.”
A more detailed independent autopsy commissioned by Good’s family said one bullet pierced the left side her head and exited on the right side. This autopsy, released Wednesday through the Romanucci & Blandin law firm, said bullets also struck her in the arm and breast, although those injuries weren’t immediately life-threatening.
Antonio Romanucci, an attorney for the family, said in a statement that the family is still awaiting the full report from the medical examiner and “hope that they communicate with Renee’s family and share their report before releasing any further information to the public.”
A spokesperson for the firm said there were no funeral plans to share yet.
