While employed at a gold mining site close to Arafa village in the Maru Local Government Area of Zamfara State, at least five foreign nationals from Burkina Faso were kidnapped by bandits.
Zagazola Makama, a security and counterinsurgency specialist in the Lake Chad area, revealed this in a post on X.
According to the source, the event happened on March 14 at around 11:15 a.m. when a sizable gang of bandits, who were allegedly hibernating between the villages of Arafa and Gidan Dankande, attacked the mining site and forcibly transported the workers to an unidentified place.
It said that the heavily armed bandits vanished right away into the nearby jungle. When security guards from a nearby Operation FANSAN YAMMA base arrived, the crooks had already disappeared.
The source claims that security personnel are searching the area for information on the whereabouts of the kidnapped foreign people in an effort to hunt down the bandits and secure their safe release.
It should be noted that the occurrence is a part of Zamfara’s perilous link between armed banditry and illicit mining.
Recall that the North West’s mineral wealth—gold, copper, and lithium—has turned into a double-edged sword over time, drawing both respectable investors and violent criminal organizations who take use of the resources for financial gain.
