Nigeria to airlift 800 students on Sunday

The Director General of the National Emergency Management Agency, Mustapha Ahmed, has said that about 800 students will be airlifted from Aswan tomorrow.

The PUNCH reports that the Nigerian Government had been airlifting Nigerians in Sudan to safety following the breakout of hostilities between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in the Northeasterner country.

He said “We have aircraft on the ground as we speak, two are in Aswan and our people are on their way to the airport, so hopefully, they will take off tomorrow morning and by tomorrow afternoon or evening, we will receive a large batch of almost 800 students.

“For Port Sudan, we will continue with the evacuation. Tarco is going back. Azman is going to do back-to-back evacuation because of its 400-seater capacity and we have already started engaging Air Peace to go back because of the 274-seater capacity.”

Meanwhile, the Chairman/Chief Executive Officer, Nigerian in Diaspora Commission, NIDCOM, Abike Dabiri-Erewa has disclosed that the returnees would undergo trauma counselling.

She said “There will be trauma counselling for all the returnees because they have gone through a lot of traumas. Watch out for information on various websites of the emergency team on various counselling for everyone. We are talking to Dangote and some other NGOs about that.”

A total of 637 evacuees have been evacuated back home from Egypt and Port Sudan since the country started airlifting on Wednesday.

The first batch of 376 were airlifted on Wednesday night while the second batch of 130 were airlifted by a Sudanese aircraft, Tarco on Friday.

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