Renowned Islamic Scholar, Sheikh Ahmad Gumi has vouched that Friday’s abductors of Zamfara schoolgirls were not the bandits he recently held peace talks with.
The bandits had stormed Government Secondary School Jangebe in Talata Mafara Local Government Area of the state around 2am, and abducted over 300 female students.
Speaking in a telephone interview with The Nation, Gumi said the abduction was rather carried out by a splinter group of the Zamfara bandits.
Gumi who appeared to have reached out to the bandit leaders he recently met in the Sububu and Pakai forests, maintained that: “they are not the ones that abducted the girls. It is a splinter group”.
When asked whether he would be going to Zamfara to meet the bandits for talks and plea for release of the school girls, Sheikh Gumi simply said, “maybe”.
It would be recalled that the Islamic scholar had taken a delegation for peace talks to bandits’ hideouts in Zamfara where about 500 were reported to have repented in Shinkafi local government area.