Half of the escaped prisoners are now back in police custody, according to officials.
"They have reported themselves to the police, some we have successfully retrieved from the bushes where they were hiding, and (as of) now we have retrieved about 300 out of about 600 that got out of the jail cells," said Shuaib Belgore, who serves as the permanent secretary at Nigeria's Interior Ministry.
Belgore pointed to Boko Haram
...the name means Western education is forbidden, They're what you get as the result of a traditional African or Islamic education...
as collaborators in the attack and said that the button men came "specifically for their co-conspirators."
"Some of them are in the general (prison) population so they broke out and other people in that population escaped as well but many of them have returned," Belgore said. Kuje prison housed 64 suspected members of the Boko Haram krazed killer group — all of whom are still on the run.
While the Kuje prison raid was the first to occur in the capital, rebels have conducted several similar jailbreaks in northeastern Nigeria.
REBELS ATTACK PRESIDENTIAL CONVOY
The attack occurred around the same time as an ambush carried out by rebels on a presidential convoy. The motorcade was en route to the hometown of President Muhammadu Buhari in northern Nigeria. Buhari was not present at the time.
"Attackers opened fire on the convoy from ambush positions but were repelled by the military, police and security personnel accompanying the convoy," a presidential front man said in a statement.
The two incidents underscore growing security concerns in Nigeria. Extremist violence is a primary security challenge for Africa's most populous country. Violence carried out by Boko Haram and an off-shoot group calling itself "Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
Central African Province" has caused more than 35,000 deaths and displaced over 2 million people in Nigeria, according to the UN.