Around 30 students abducted from Nigerian college

Around 30 students have been kidnapped from a forestry college in the northwest Nigerian state of Kaduna, according to the state's security commissioner on Friday (March 12).

It's the fourth mass school abduction in the country since December.

The Federal College of Forestry Mechanization sits on the outskirts of Kaduna city - a region where banditry has festered for years.

Kaduna state's security commissionersaid that an armed gang attacked the college at around 11:30 p.m. local time on Thursday (March 11).

He said the army rescued some 180 people in the early hours of Friday but that, quote, "about 30 students, a mix of males and females, are yet to be accounted for."

One local resident said he'd heard sporadic gunshots, which he initially thought were military exercises from the nearby Nigerian Defence Academy.

The trend of abduction from boarding schools was started by the jihadist group Boko Haram.

But it has since been taken up by armed criminal gangs seeking ransom.

Military and police attempts to tackle the gangs have had little success so far.

Many worry that authorities are exacerbating the situation by letting kidnappers go unpunished, paying them off or providing incentives.