French family captured in Cameroon, freed in Nigeria

The seven members of a French family who were seized in northern Cameroon earlier in the week have been found in Dikwa, a northern Nigerian town, 80 kilometers from Maiduguri, the Borno state capital.

According to reports, they were found abandoned in a house in the town.

“The hostages are safe and sound and are in the hands of Nigerian authorities,” an official source said.

The freed hostages include a couple, their children aged 5, 8, 10 and 12 and an uncle.

They had gone to spend the weekend at a park in Northern Cameroon and were returning to Yaounde on Tuesday when they were kidnapped by six gun-toting men on motor bikes, who blocked their vehicle.

Cameroon and French officials wasted no time in blaming extremists from neighbouring Nigeria. Cameroon said the victims were taken over the border.

Eight foreigners are still being held by Nigerian extremists, including seven seized on Saturday night in northern Nigeria’s Bauchi state and a French engineer taken in December from Katsina state, also in Nigeria’s north.

There have been a total of five kidnappings thought to be connected to Nigerian Islamists since 2011, with suspicions mainly falling on a group known as Ansaru, believed to be a splinter faction of extremist group Boko Haram.

The mainly Muslim north of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation and largest oil producer, has been plagued by violence for several years, with Boko Haram carrying out an insurgency with suicide attacks, assassinations and roadside bombings.

However, apart from a 2011 suicide bombing of UN headquarters in Abuja, Boko Haram has mainly set its sights on domestic targets, including Nigerian security forces, churches and Muslim leaders it disagrees with.

Defining the group has been difficult, as it is believed to have a number of factions and its stated aims have often shifted. Imitators and criminal gangs have also carried out violence blamed on Boko Haram.

The group has however never claimed responsibility for kidnappings, unlike splinter faction Ansaru, which has claimed at least two and has been mentioned by analysts as potentially linked to all five abductions blamed on Nigerian Islamists.

Despite that, French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian blamed Boko Haram for Tuesday’s abductions in Cameroon, but said it was not clear whether it was linked to France’s intervention against Islamist rebels in Mali.

.Updated: it turned out that the story of the release was unfounded. French and Cameroonian sources later denied the report of finding the family in an abandoned house in Dikwa.