Christian group says 315 seized in latest Nigerian mass-school kidnapping

A Christian group on Saturday said 315 pupils and teachers were seized a day earlier in Nigeria’s second mass-school abduction in a week, as security fears mounted in Africa’s most populous nation.

The early Friday raid on St Mary’s co-education school in Niger state in central Nigeria came after gunmen on Monday stormed a secondary school in neighbouring Kebbi state, abducting 25 girls.

The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) said the new number came “after a verification exercise” following the early Friday mass kidnapping, and added that, “The total number of victims abducted … is now 303 pupils and 12 teachers”.

The number of boys and girls kidnapped from St Mary’s is almost half of the school’s pupil population of 629.

The Nigerian government has not commented on the number of pupils and teachers abducted.

Authorities in the nearby states of Katsina and Plateau have, meanwhile, ordered all schools to close as a precautionary measure.

The Niger state government closed many schools and president Bola Tinubu cancelled international engagements, including attending the G20 summit in Johannesburg, to handle the crisis.

The two abduction operations and an attack on a church in the west of the country, in which two people were killed, have happened since United States president Donald Trump threatened military action over what he called the killing of Christians by radical Islamists in Nigeria.

Nigeria is still scarred by the kidnapping of nearly 300 girls by Boko Haram jihadists at Chibok in northeastern Borno state more than a decade ago. Some of those girls are still missing.

MYRIAD SECURITY CHALLENGES

CAN said reverend Bulus Yohanna, who is also the Catholic Bishop of Kontagora diocese under which the school falls, gave the update after visiting St Mary’s.

“After we left the school at Papiri, we decided to make calls, do verification exercises and do further enquiries on those we had thought escaped successfully, only to discover that 88 more students were also captured after they tried to escape,” he said.

“This now takes the number to 303 pupils (male and female) including 12 teachers (four females and eight males) bringing the total number of abducted persons to 315,” he said in a statement.

For years, heavily armed criminal gangs have been intensifying attacks in rural areas of northwest and central Nigeria, where there is little state presence, killing thousands and conducting kidnappings for ransom.

The gangs have camps in a vast forest straddling several states including Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna, Sokoto, Kebbi and Niger.

A United Nations source, speaking on condition of anonymity, says the children abducted on Monday at Kebbi had probably been taken to the Birnin Gwari forest in nearby Kaduna state.

In a separate attack on a church in western Nigeria on Tuesday, gunmen killed two people during a service that was being broadcast online.

Dozens of worshippers are believed to have been abducted.

As Nigeria grapples with security challenges on several fronts, hostage-taking has spiralled nationwide and become a favoured tactic of bandit gangs and jihadists.

Although bandits have no ideological leanings and are motivated by financial gain, their increasing alliance with jihadists from the northeast has been a source of concern for authorities and security analysts.

Jihadists have for 16 years been waging an insurrection in the northeast with the aim of establishing a Caliphate.

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