PHOTO: Bandits wear Shoes Designed like Cow Footprints to mask trail – Bandits currently carrying out kidnapping of school pupils especially in Northern Nigeria have devised a rare but crafty means of evading capture by Nigerian forces in forests as they have designed shows using cow hooves to mask their trails, Financial Watch can report.
The rare picture of a pair of shoes worn by bandits which have gone viral on social media have highlighted major concerns by Nigerians that the perpetuators may be highly skilled in the art of deception in masking their trails from authorities while the capture and torture victims as they demand ransom from the government.
At least 10 institutions have been hit by bandits and around 1,000 students and staff abducted since December.
Six students and two officials who were kidnapped last month from a school in Nigeria’s Kaduna state were released after relatives paid ransom money, a school official and parent said on Friday.
Kidnappings by bandits have become endemic in northern Nigeria, disrupting the education of hundreds of thousands of children.
Gunmen attacked the main campus of the Nuhu Bamalli Polytechnic in Kaduna on June 10 and took students and staff members, in the process killing one student.
The college’s spokesman Abdullahi Shehu, said the students and officials were released late on Thursday at an undisclosed location.
They “regained their freedom after their parents and relatives negotiated with the bandits”, Shehu told reporters, but declined to say whether negotiations involved paying a ransom.
A prominent Muslim cleric acting as a self-appointed middleman has been a divisive figure in the kidnap-for-ransom crisis plaguing northern Nigeria, Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, a former army captain, was involved in release of 27 students abducted in March from a forestry college in Nigeria’s Kaduna state.
