15 school children, teacher kidnapped in Cameroon

Fifteen school children and a teacher of a private school in Kumba, a town in the Southwest, one of the two war-torn English-speaking regions of Cameroon, have been abducted by gunmen, local residents who witnessed the kidnapping have told Xinhua.

The Cameroonian government is still tracing when and how the kidnapping happened, Cameroon's minister of communication, Issa Tchiroma Bakary, told Xinhua by telephone.

It was the second abduction of students this month in Cameroon's troubled Anglophone zone. On Nov. 4, 79 school children were kidnapped in a private school in the Anglophone region of Northwest. They were released a few days later.