Gunmen have kidnapped four Catholic nuns off a road in southeastern Nigeria, a local convent said on Monday, in the latest sign of widespread insecurity that makes road travel dangerous.
The kidnapping comes three months after the head of the country’s Methodist Church was taken by gunmen in the region. The cleric was released just a day after his kidnapping, after allegedly paying his kidnappers a ransom of 100 million naira (about US$235,000).
Armed gangs have been kidnapping people, including priests, to loot villages and roads, mainly in the northwest, and the practice has spread to other parts of the country, adding to insecurity in Africa’s most populous nation.
Zita Ihedoro, secretary general of the Sisters of Jesus, said the four nuns were kidnapped while traveling from Rivers State to Imo for a Thanksgiving Mass on Sunday.
“We beg you for intense prayers for a speedy and safe release,” Ihedoro said in a statement.
Local police spokesman Michael Abattam said officers were chasing the kidnappers.
“We are on their trail,” Abattam told CNN this Tuesday (23). “We are doing everything we can to make them [as freiras] be rescued.”
In the northwest, the Nigerian military has launched an air offensive to eliminate the armed groups responsible for kidnapping citizens from villages and towns in the region.
“Specifically in the northwest, the effect of attacks carried out by NAF (Nigerian Air Force) aircraft revealed that several terrorists were eliminated and their territories destroyed,” the Nigerian Air Force said in a recent statement.
Source: CNN Brasil
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