FACT REPORT: Zamfara Girls, Not Abducted Students of Kuriga School Kaduna Wielded Gun in Viral Video
By Abdul Ozumi,
Recently, social media posts, mostly on WhatsApp accompanying a viral video claimed that bandits have threatened to marry off abducted school girls from Kuriga, in Kaduna State due to delay in ransom payment. https://prnigeria.com/2024/03/17/young-girls-guns-kuriga/
The video started trending on social media, especially X, formerly twitter after daredevil bandits abducted about 300 students of LEA Primary School, Kuriga town in Chikun Local Government Area of Kaduna State, on March 7, 2024, and marched them into the forest unchallenged.
Premium Times reports that an estimated 100 students were abducted from the primary school while 187 were abducted from the secondary school.
After the report, a viral video of young girls stripped with guns and ammunition went viral claiming that they were from Kuriga school. A particular X user with verified account, Queen Bee posted the video on her page with the following text: “NIGERIA HAVE NO PRESIDENT AND NO GOVERNMENT***
“This is heartbreaking!!! The Govt. if they exist in Nigerian at the moment haven’t said anything.
“How can this be happening in a sovereign country and you think they have a Govt?
“The Terrorists/Bandits now threatened to share these captured children as wives if ransom aren’t paid immediately.
“…Shame on Tinubu!!!”, she wrote
Her post attracted over 130,000 views, 465 reposts, 82 quotes, 416 likes and 92 bookmarks.
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But to verify the veracity of the claim, PRNigeria fact-check broke the video into key frames, by taking intermittent screenshots from the video, and then subjected them to reverse image searches, using fact-checking tools.
Results from this search revealed that the video was actually the one released by terrorists who kidnapped daughters of a former Accountant General of Zamfara State, Abubakar Bello Furfuri in October, 2022.
The abductees were kidnapped on the night of June 5 in Furfuri community under Bungudu Local Government Area of the state.
The 2:05 minute video had their abductors threatening fire and brimstone, saying they are going to marry them off, or force them into terrorism.
In the video, four girls were seen standing, wielding arms and caches of ammunition hung around their necks.
Further checks by PRNigeria, using keywords search revealed that Furfuri’s daughters later regained freedom from their abductors on Monday November 7, 2022, barely a month after the release of the viral video
Upon their release, the girls were presented to the immediate past governor of the state, Mohammed Matawalle by the Assistant Inspector General of Police (AIG) in charge of Zone 10, Bello Sani Deljan.
Based on the authenticity of the available facts gathered, the video is actually an old video released in 2022 by the abductors of young girls in Zamfara and not Kidnapped students of Kuriga school in Kaduna.
PRNigeria fact-check therefore concludes that the viral video claiming that the girls wielding arms and caches of ammunition hung around their necks are from Kuriga school in Kaduna State is Misleading and False.
