PSS Nkwen kidnapping

Around 3 a.m. on November 4, 2018, armed men entered the Presbyterian Secondary School (PSS) in Nkwen, a town near Bamenda in Cameroon's Anglophone region, and kidnapped 79 students along with the school principal and three staff members. According to students who were later released, the armed men woke them up, ordered them to sit in front of the school, and made a selection of who would be taken. The captives, students aged 11 to 17, were marched into the bush and then to the town of Bafut, bypassing numerous security checkpoints operating in and around Bamenda.

The kidnapping occurred against a backdrop of ongoing violence in Southern Cameroons, where Ambazonian separatists had, since 2017, attacked and burned schools as part of a campaign to force closures. At least 42 schools were reported attacked between February 2017 and May 2018. Separatists have described schools as targets partly because French is taught as a mandatory subject, and have warned parents to keep children home for their safety.

The day after the abduction, Cameroonian authorities announced that the military would be deployed to locate and free the students, but these searches were unsuccessful. On November 7, all 79 students were released, while the principal and the three staff members remained in captivity for five additional days before being freed on November 12. Cameroonian authorities, despite having been unable to locate the captives themselves, claimed some credit for the release, asserting that the kidnappers had given up due to fears of being surrounded.

The circumstances and motive behind the kidnapping remain unclear. The kidnappers identified themselves as "Amba Boys," a common term for Ambazonian separatist fighters. A Presbyterian minister involved in the negotiations said no ransom was demanded; instead, the kidnappers wanted the school to close as part of a school boycott that separatists had declared the previous year. Released students said the kidnappers instructed them to stop attending school and to relay that message to other students. The school was closed following the incident, though details of the negotiations were not released publicly.

However, a spokesperson for the Ambazonia Self-Defence Council denied that the kidnappers were affiliated with the separatist cause, stating that separatist fighters had themselves searched for the missing students. Separatist representatives alleged the entire incident was a false-flag operation staged by the Cameroonian government to discredit the separatist movement, claiming to recognize one of the kidnappers in a released video as a French-speaking man from Yaoundé. No individual has been identified, charged, or convicted in connection with the kidnapping, and the case remains without a confirmed perpetrator or resolved explanation.