In one of the most humiliating episodes yet in the kidnapping saga in Nigeria, kidnapped students of the Federal College of Forestry Mechanization Kaduna, have appeared in videos Saturday appealing to the government to come to their rescue but not with force.
The gunmen are demanding a ransom of N500 for the 39 students – 23 females and 16 males, – whom they abducted on Thursday night.
The highly traumatized, bruised, and beaten students, both male and female, are seen sitting on the ground, huddled together under some trees standing far from each other against sparse vegetation. The students begging the government not to apply force to rescue them because their captors mean business. They are ready to finish them off should the government try anything funny by way of a rescue attempt, the students lament.
In one of the videos, young ladies, with just wrappers over their chests and braziers, are seen crying and begging the government to do the needful: “Just pay the ransom. Our parents need us.” Most of the guys are wearing only their shorts.
As they wail, their captors, clad in military fatigue, move menacingly among them, brandishing their AK-47 raffles, with at least one of them fitted with a bayonet. As the kidnappers move amidst the student, they point the guns at whoever they want to speak to the government.
At a point, some of the captors could be seen flogging the students, both males and females. It is a vicious flogging. As the captors flog, the students wail.
A lady speaks in the Hausa language, obviously repeating what the others had said in English.
In another video, one of the students introduces himself as Benson Emmanuel. He declared that he and his colleagues had been surrounded by the gunmen who threatened that none of them would leave alive once the security agents attempt to rescue them by force.
“They have surrounded us, saying anybody who comes to rescue us by force, they are going to take our lives,” he said
Like the ladies, Emmanuel appealed for the government’s moves to deliver them at this early stage, noting that some of the students had been injured badly.
” They have bad mind against us, we are appealing to the government to settle this early,” he said.
Similarly, a female student also spoke in Hausa, repeated what Emmanuel had said in the video. The students looked so dejected and terrified in the video, with no tops but only trousers for the males and wrappers for the females.
