Gunmen have freed all 279 girls kidnapped from a boarding school in northwest Nigeria, officials said on Tuesday, as victims told how their abductors had beaten and threatened to shoot them.

The pupils from Jangebe, a town in Zamfara state, were seized just after midnight on Friday. All had now been freed, Zamfara Governor Bello Matawalle said.

Umma Abubakar, among those released, described their ordeal.

“Most of us got injured on our feet and we could not continue trekking, so they said they will shoot anybody who did not continue to walk,” she told Reuters.

Boarding schools in northern Nigeria have become targets for mass kidnappings for ransom by armed criminal gangs, a trend started by the jihadist group Boko Haram and continued by its offshoot, Islamic State West Africa Province.

Friday’s raid on the Government Girls Science Secondary School was the second such abduction in little over a week in the northwest, a region increasingly targeted by gangs.

Governor Matawalle said “repentant bandits” working with the government under an amnesty programme had helped secure the Jangebe girls’ release.

“Those repentant ones are working for us, and they are working for the government and they are working for security,” he said.

Officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have said the rise in abductions has been fuelled in part by sizable government payoffs in exchange for child hostages.

The national government denies this, and President Muhammadu Buhari warned on Tuesday against making payoffs.

Matawalle’s special media adviser, Zailani Bappa, said Zamfara authorities had paid no ransom for the Jangebe girls.

Initial reports put the number kidnapped at 317, but Zamfara government spokesman Sulaiman Tanau Anka said the total was 279, as some of the girls had run into the bush at the time of the raid.

‘THEY HIT US WITH GUNS’

Most of the girls appeared unharmed, but at least a dozen were sent to hospital.

Farida Lawali, 15, told how she and the other girls had been taken to a forest by the kidnappers.

“They carried the sick ones that cannot move. We were walking in the stones and thorns,” she said, sitting in the government house building, covered in a light blue veil.