Nigeria’s president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, has sent troops to rescue more than 250 children kidnapped by gunmen from a school in the north-west of the country in one of the largest mass abductions in recent years.
The mass kidnapping in Kaduna state was the second in a week in Nigeria, where heavily armed criminal gangs on motorbikes target victims in villages and schools and along highways in search of ransom payments.
Local government officials in Kaduna confirmed the kidnapping at Kuriga school on Thursday, but said they could not give firm figures because they were still working out how many children had been abducted.
At least one person was shot dead during the attack, local residents said.
Sani Abdullahi, a teacher at the GSS Kuriga school in Chikun district, said staff managed to escape with many students when the gunmen, known locally as bandits, attacked early on Thursday firing in the air.
He told local officials 187 pupils had been taken from the main junior school and another 100 from the primary classes. Three local residents also said that between 200 and 280 children and teachers had been abducted.
“Early in the morning … we heard gunshots from bandits. Before we knew it they had gathered up the children,” Musa Mohammed, a local resident said. “We are pleading to the government, all of us are pleading, they should please help us with security.”
The Kaduna abduction and the mass kidnapping a week ago from camps for displaced people displaced in north-east Borno state illustrate the challenge facing Tinubu, who promised to make Nigeria safer and bring in more foreign investment.
“I have received briefing from security chiefs on the two incidents, and I am confident that the victims will be rescued,” Tinubu said in a statement ordering that armed forces to track down the kidnappers. “Nothing else is acceptable to me and the waiting family members of these abducted citizens. Justice will be decisively administered.”
The two mass kidnappings come almost 10 years after the Boko Haram group triggered a major international outcry in April 2014 by kidnapping more than 250 schoolgirls from Chibok in Borno state. Some of those girls are still missing.
More than 100 people are reported missing after militants carried out the mass kidnapping last week targeting women and children in camps for those displaced by conflict in Borno, but conflicting accounts have emerged about the time and number of victims.
Police did not provide figures for the Kuriga school kidnapping. The numbers reported in such incidents are often lowered after people who went missing while fleeing them return home.
“The Kaduna state government and security agencies are working round the clock to ensure the safe return of the schoolchildren,” the state governor, Uba Sani, said on X. “I have received strong assurances from the president and national security adviser that no stone will be left unturned to bring back the children.”
Hundreds of schoolchildren and college students have been kidnapped in mass abductions in the north-west and central regions in the last three years, including in Kaduna.
Almost all were released for ransom payments after weeks or months spent in captivity at camps hidden in the forests that stretch across north-western Nigeria.
Unicef condemned Thursday’s attack and called on the government to do more to protect students.
“Schools are supposed to be sanctuaries of learning and growth, not sites of fear and violence,” the agency’s Nigeria director, Christian Munduate, said in a statement.
Nigeria’s armed forces are battling on several fronts, including against armed criminals in the north-west and a long-running jihadist insurgency in the north-east that has killed 40,000 people and displaced more than two million since 2009.
Fighting in Borno has eased as militants have been pushed back from the territory they once controlled, but they still carry out attacks, kidnappings and raids in remote areas.
Gunmen abducted more than 30 people, including 24 female students, in a raid on a university in north-west Zamfara state in September.
In February 2021, gunmen raided a girls’ boarding school in the town of Jangebe in Zamfara, kidnapping about 300 students. Months earlier, more than 300 students were taken from a boys school in Kankara in Katsina state. They were released days later.
Between July 2022 and June 2023, 3,620 people were abducted in 582 kidnapping incidents in Nigeria, according to the local risk analysts SBM Intelligence. It has recorded 4,777 people abducted since Tinubu took office in May last year.
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