Cameroonian students and school staff who were kidnapped at the weekend have been freed, the Bishop of Kumbo, Georges Nkuo said. has told the BBC.
A total of 176 people, mostly students, were kidnapped by unidentified gunmen at Saint Augustin’s College in Kumbo, in the North West region of Cameroon. They were released on Sunday after negotiations, Nkuo told the BBC.
It is the largest school kidnapping in Cameroon’s English-speaking regions since separatist unrest began in 2017. The gunmen entered the campus of Saint Augustine’s College Nso on Saturday morning and seized 170 students, two security guards, a teacher and three of his children, the Diocesan Director of Communications said in a statement.
Rev Elvis Nsaikila added that the authorities of the boarding school had requested parents and guardians to take their children back home as soon as possible as “the school has closed down”. Nkuo confirmed to BBC Afrique that the church officials had negotiated the release of the hostages on the condition that the school would close down.
“If the army had intervened, there would have been deaths,” he said. Saturday’s school attack was not the first in the restive Anglophone North West region. A similar incident took place in November last year in the regional headquarter, Bamenda, where more than 80 people, including the principal, a teacher, a driver and 79 students, were kidnapped from the Presbyterian Secondary School Nkwen.
The abduction of the school children and staff marked an escalation of the two-year long crisis that has gripped the two English-speaking North West and South West regions. Militias who want to create an independent state called Ambazonia, began to emerge in 2017 after security forces responded violently to protests calling for English to be used in classrooms and courtrooms in Cameroon’s Anglophone regions. The country is dominated by its French-speaking majority.