More than 300 schoolboys kidnapped last week in an attack on their school in northwest Nigeria have arrived in the capital of Katsina state amid celebrations of their release.
Television pictures on Friday showed the boys, many of them wearing light green uniforms and clutching blankets, arriving on buses, looking weary but otherwise well.
The boys were abducted last Friday after gunmen raided the all-boys Government Science Secondary School in Katsina’s Kankara village and marched nearly 350 of them into the nearby Rugu forest. The Boko Haram armed group claimed responsibility for the abduction.
None of the boys spoke as they walked from the bus in single file, flanked by soldiers, into a government building.
Al Jazeera’s Ahmed Idris, reporting from Katsina, said the boys walked barefoot, some of them limping with blisters on their feet.
“You can see they are virtually exhausted and traumatised following the events of the past seven days,” he said. “You can see fear, confusion, trauma,” he added, shortly after the boys walked past him at the scene of their arrival.
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