A senior army officer led a team of soldiers to invade a secondary school in Niger State because a teacher punished his girlfriend.
Students and teachers of Hilltop Model Secondary
School in Minna, Niger State, were yesterday, February 24, 2015, thrown
into panic as they scampered for their safety as some soldiers of
the Nigeria Army led by a senior officer, from the 31 Artillery Brigade
in the state, unleashed havoc in the school because a teacher punished
his girlfriend.
According to reports, the soldiers invaded the school
in a commando fashion, fully armed with assault riffles, during the
morning assembly and held the teachers and students hostage, asking for
the teacher who had the effrontery to punish and officer's lover. The
report added that the soldiers disrupted academic activities for the day before whisking the female student who was punished, away.
A
teacher who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the soldiers with
their name tags removed, arrived in a Mitsubishi Hilux pickup, with
registration number 31 AB 035 NA, shooting sporadically into the air as
if they were going to war.
The teacher continued
that the soldiers came on the invitation of one Farida Mustapha, a
Senior Secondary School female student of the school, who was punished
by a teacher over an offence.
He explained that the teacher was having a lesson with Farida’s class when an unknown student used an abusive language.
And since nobody owned up to the misbehaviour, the teacher punished the whole class, including Farida.
The
girl then invited her boyfriend who led the team of soldiers to harass
everyone in the school with a promise to deal with the errant teacher.
The school's principal, Bala Mohammed, spoke on the incident:
"We thank God that the students were not on break, else they would have knocked at least one down.
I cannot talk to journalists now until I get permission from the state Commissioner for Education, Alhaji Danladi Abdulhameed.
But I have invited the Zonal Inspector and he is on the way to the school to see things for himself."
