15 kidnapped from school bus

Nigeria (AP)

Gunmen kidnapped 15 school children on their way to class at a private school near Nigeria's oil-rich and restive southern delta, a police spokesman said yesterday.

Abia state police spokesman Geoffrey Ogbonna said the gunmen stopped the school bus Monday morning as it headed toward the Abayi International School. The gunmen seized all the mobile telephones from the students, the bus driver and a teacher onboard before taking the children away, the spokesman said.

Ogbonna said the kidnappers apparently demanded more than $130,000 to release the children. The spokesman said he did not know the identities of the kidnappers or the hostages.

A spokesman for Nigeria's federal police force in Abuja said the agency had sent additional investigators and officers to the region to assist in the search for the children.

Abia state, in Nigeria's southeast, sits near the Niger Delta, a maze of mangroves and creeks where foreign oil firms draw crude in Africa's most populous nation. The region has long been plagued by violence from militants upset about the region's unceasing poverty and from opportunistic criminal gangs targeting foreigners for kidnappings.