A group of gunmen from a criminal gang abducted 25 students and killed a staff member after raiding a Nigerian girls’ high school on Monday morning.
The attack occurred more than ten years after the abduction of 276 girls from Chibok, an incident that drew international outrage and united people through the “#BringBackOurGirls” social media campaign.
Since then, there have been numerous other abductions involving school children across Northern Nigeria.
According to police, the assailants were armed with “sophisticated weapons” and fired sporadically after storming into the Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School in Kebbi state around 4:00 a.m. local time.
Police responded to the scene, but the suspected kidnappers had already escaped, having scaled the fence.
They took the 25 students from their hostel to an unknown destination.
Reports indicate that the gunmen shot and killed the school’s deputy head, while a security guard was injured during the attack.
Military forces, including police tactical units and local vigilantes, have been deployed to the area.
They are currently searching for the suspects’ possible escape routes and nearby forests in an effort to rescue the abducted students and apprehend the gang members.
This marks the second mass school abduction in Kebbi within four years. The previous incident occurred in June 2021, when bandits abducted over 100 students and staff from a government college.
Following ransom demands from parents, the students were gradually released in batches over a two-year period. Some students were forcibly married off and returned with children.
An Increase in Hostage Situations
Nigeria’s northwest region has experienced a rise in heavily armed criminal gangs known as “bandits” who engage in kidnapping, killing residents, cattle rustling, village raids, and home looting; it is also the area most affected by abductions.
Since the emergence of Boko Haram in 2009, Nigeria has been plagued by ongoing armed violence.
The kidnapping of schoolgirls from Chibok in April 2014 gained international attention. To this day, nearly 100 of the captives remain missing.
In March last year, more than 130 schoolchildren were abducted by gunmen in another northwestern state, Kaduna. They were later released unharmed.
Due to under-reporting, the data on kidnapping incidents in Nigeria is unreliable. However, according to UNICEF, there have been over 2,400 incidents affecting more than 6,800 children in Nigeria’s northeastern region since 2014.
A report by Save the Children states that nearly 1,700 students were kidnapped from Nigerian schools between early 2014 and 2022.
As Nigeria continues to face significant security challenges, hostage-taking has become an almost industry-wide issue.
In the northwest, authorities have attempted to negotiate with bandits by striking peace agreements and deploying vigilante groups.
However, these efforts have yielded little success, with critics arguing that the kidnapping crisis has spiraled out of control.
