Officials in Nigeria have said the students were freed with the help of several of their captors who had been pressured by a military crackdown to work with authorities.

Seventy-five children who were kidnapped from their school in Nigeria's northwestern state of Zamfara were freed after their abductors came under pressure from a military crackdown, a state official said on Sunday (September 12). Gunmen took the students from the village of Kaya on Sept. 1, the latest in a spate of mass kidnappings from schools across the region. More than 1,100 children have been abducted since December last year. Authorities say heavily armed gangs of bandits, seeking ransom payments, are behind the abductions.

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The attack on a remote village in the northwest of the country comes days after bandits released 90 pupils they had held captive. Police are searching for the perpetrators of the latest crime.

Attackers shot dead at least 36 people and destroyed buildings in a night raid on a village near the central Nigerian city of Jos, officials said on Wednesday (August 25), in an area hit by repeated ethnic clashes. The gunmen went house to house killing residents in Yelwa Zangam late on Tuesday (August 24), a military spokesman said. Troops struggled to get to the area as a bridge had been destroyed, he added.

Abubakar Adam has not seen seven of his 10 children in the two months since armed men snatched them from their boarding school in Nigeria's northern Niger state. He sold his car, a parcel of land, cleaned out his savings and along with other parents sought help from friends and relatives to raise 30 million naira ($72,993) to get their children back. But the bandits just took the money - and one of the men delivering it - leaving Adam with nothing. The rash of kidnappings across the largely poor northwest has left hundreds of parents facing the same desperate quandary: beg, borrow and sell assets, or risk never seeing their children again.

The attack left 14 children dead as the assailants reportedly "shot at anything that moved." It's the latest attack in near Niger's border with Mali.

Funerals were held for victims of an attack on a Muslim convoy on the outskirts of Nigeria's Jos state, which left at least 22 people dead.

Officials in Nigeria - a hub for illegal wildlife trafficking - have seized a record amount of pangolin scales and claws and elephant tusks as the government attempts to combat the trade, the head of customs said on Wednesday (August 4). The seizure, worth 22 billion naira ($54 million), included 17,134 kg of pangolin scales, 870 kg of elephant tusks and 4.60 kg in pangolin claws, Colonel Hameed Ibrahim Ali, comptroller-general of customs, said in a statement to the press.

People who fled their homes and farms due to an ongoing Islamist insurgency in northeast Nigeria are struggling to access food due to soaring inflation.

The schoolgirl surrendered to the military last month along with someone she married in captivity. The governor said she will receive psychological and medical care. Over 100 schoolgirls are still missing.

Nigerian authorities enlist the help of traditional hunters to guard farmers in their fields against attacks from the radical Islamist insurgent group Boko Haram.