A tree trunk, some quick thinking and crawling several miles through the forest helped a Nigerian schoolboy escape from kidnappers.
The 17-year-old student (name witheld) was abducted alongside more than 500 others from Government Science Secondary School in Katsina state on Friday night.
According to him while speaking to the BBC Hausa “We were being pushed and beaten, we spent the night marching, sometimes walking on thorns. Thirty minutes before dawn we were told to sleep”.
He said that while the group was resting, he found a tree under which he sat down.
“After we sat down, I leaned back a little, I found the side of a tree which I hid behind.
I lay down and stretched out my legs.
When the gunmen ordered the rest of the group to move on, they didn’t notice him behind the tree.
“After everyone left, I started crawling and looking round, until I entered a nearby village, and it is by the special grace of God that I was able to escape,” he said.
Katsina State governor Aminu Bello Masari said 333 students were still missing but it is not clear how many of them are with their abductors, as many may have run away and not yet been found.
However, Garba Shehu, a spokesman for the Nigerian president, had told the BBC that students who had fled said only 10 of their colleagues remained with the gunmen.
The student who escaped said the armed men came to the school around 21:30 local time (20:30 GMT) on Friday and that many students jumped the school fence and fled when they heard gunshots.
However they were tracked by the gunmen who had flashlights and who tricked them into believing that they were security personnel and asked them to return.
The students would later realise that the men were not who they said they were.
At this point it is believed that the students were rounded up and forced to walk into the forest by the armed men.
“After we were taken into the forest, one of them ordered us to stop and count our belongings before continuing our journey,” he said.
He said that 520 students were counted and that he did not see anyone else while he was escaping.
The government has blamed the attack on bandits, a loose term for gangs operating in the area, often kidnapping people for ransom.
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