Nigerian student among latest to be abducted by militants

Adighibenma Wayne, a Nigerian student studying at the Luhansk Medical University has disappeared and his friends believe that he could have been abducted by the Kremlin-backed militants calling themselves the Luhansk People’s Republic.  Informator.lg.ua presumably quotes the same friends in saying that “he’s a white Nigerian and the separatists think that he is an American spy”.

The same source, which has been chronicling the ever-rising number of abductions by these same militants, reports that on July 16 four African nationals - Rasaki Wasiu; Oyinloye Sherif; Salis Akhmed David and David Oredugba, and one Luhansk woman, named only as Tatyana - also disappeared.  The website explains that after contact was lost with the first two men who live in Luhansk, the other two men went to their home to find out what had happened.  They too have not been seen since, nor has Tatyana, who also tried to find out their whereabouts.

Judging from a report in the Russian Gazeta.ru,  the above are not the only African students or others from Luhansk to have been abducted by the militants.  The reporter says that while “waiting for a meeting with people’s governor Valery Bolotov, I observed an exotic picture: around ten dark-skinned students from Africa were building barricades from bags of sand inside the former building of the regional administration. They were carrying the bags on their backs, others put them down and beat them in with a board.  They’re not working of their own free will.”