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Nigerian security agents have rescued nearly 200 kidnapped people during raids on camps of criminal gangs in dense forests in the country’s northwest, police said.

Heavily armed criminal gangs known locally as bandits have plagued northwest and central Nigeria for years, raiding and looting villages and abducting for ransom.

The rescued victims -187 men, women and children – were freed in Zamfara state, where they had been abducted in separate bandit attacks, police said late on Thursday.