Freed Nigerian schoolboys return home

Dozens of schoolboys who were rescued from kidnappers in northwest Nigeria arrived back home on Friday, many of them barefoot and clutching blankets.

Television pictures showed the boys dressed in dusty clothes, looking weary but otherwise well, getting off buses in the city of Katsina and walking to a government building.

One of them, with flecks of dried mud on his face, told Channels TV the captors had fed them bread and cassava.

"It was cold," he told the reporter. Asked how he had felt when the bus arrived in Katsina, he said: "I was really happy," and broke into a smile.

A week earlier, gunmen on motorbikes raided the boys' boarding school in the nearby town of Kankara and marched hundreds of them into the vast Rugu forest. Authorities said security services rescued them on Thursday, although it was not clear if all of them had been recovered.

The abduction gripped a country already incensed by widespread insecurity, and evoked memories of militant group Boko Haram's 2014 kidnapping of more than 270 schoolgirls in the northeastern town of Chibok.

Six years on, only about half the girls have been found or freed. Others were married off to fighters, while some are assumed to be dead.

Hours before the rescue of the boys was announced, a video started circulating online purportedly showing Boko Haram militants with some of the boys.

Reuters was unable to verify the authenticity of the footage or who released it.

Last week's mass kidnapping piled pressure on the government to deal with militants in the north of the country.

It was particularly embarrassing for President Muhammadu Buhari, who comes from Katsina state and has repeatedly said that Boko Haram has been "technically defeated".

Buhari said he had congratulated the state's governor and the army, in a brief clip from an interview posted on his Twitter account earlier on Friday.