Gunmen are accused of kidnapping about 280 students in an attack on a school in northwestern Nigeria in one of the country’s largest kidnappings.
Mass kidnappings for ransom are a major problem and affect the entire country, the most populous on the continent. Heavily armed criminal gangs have attacked schools in the past, particularly in the northwest, but those attacks have decreased recently.
Local authorities in Kaduna state confirmed Thursday’s abduction at Kuriga school, but did not specify the number of abducted students, which is currently being assessed. At least one person was killed in the attack, residents said.
According to Sani Abdullahi, one of the teachers at the GSS Kuriga school in Chikun district, the staff managed to escape with many students while the gunmen fired in the air.
“We are trying to determine the actual number of children kidnapped,” he said Thursday night. “In Kuriga secondary school, 187 children are missing, while in the primary school, 125 children were missing, but 25 returned,” she explained.
“More than 280 children were kidnapped. At first we thought there were 200, but after careful counting we discovered that the kidnapped children are just over 280,” Muhammad Adam, a resident, told AFP.
Another resident, Musa Muhammed, reported hearing early in the morning “shots from bandits, before knowing that they had rounded up the children and kidnapped the students and their teachers, almost 200 people.”
For their part, local officials and police have not provided figures at this time. “At the moment, we do not know the number of children or students who have been kidnapped,” Kaduna State Governor Uba Sani told reporters at the scene. “No child will be abandoned,” he assured.
Estimates of the number of people kidnapped or missing in Nigeria often decline after those who managed to flee attackers return home.
Amnesty International has condemned the abductions in Kaduna and called on the Nigerian authorities to better protect schools. “Schools should be safe places and no child should have to choose between their education and their life,” said Group X. “Nigerian authorities must take immediate action to prevent attacks on schools,” they added.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu came to power in 2023 promising, like his predecessors, to address the immense challenge of insecurity, fueled by jihadist groups, bandits in the northeast and increasing inter-communal violence in the central States.
In recent years, hundreds of children and students have been kidnapped in mass kidnappings in northwestern and central Nigeria. Most were released after paying a ransom, after several weeks or months of captivity in fields hidden in the forests of the northwestern states of the country.
In February 2021, armed men attacked a girls’ school in the town of Jangebe, in the northern state of Zamfara, kidnapping more than 300 people. Since last week, more than 100 women are missing in the northeast, following a mass kidnapping attributed to jihadists.
