Gunmen attacked a government girls’ boarding school in Nigeria’s Kebbi State early yesterday, killing the vice principal and abducting 25 female students, police said, in the latest mass kidnapping in the country’s northwest.
The assailants, armed with rifles and reportedly using coordinated tactics, stormed Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School in Maga town around 4 a.m. local time, engaging police in a gunfight before scaling the perimeter fence and seizing the students, police spokesperson Nafiu Abubakar Kotarkoshi said.
A general view of Kuriga school in Kuririga on March 8, 2024, where more than 250 pupils kidnapped by gunmen. Nigeria’s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on March 8, 2024 sent troops to rescue more than 250 pupils kidnapped by gunmen from a school in the country’s northwest in one of the largest mass abductions in three years.
The Kaduna state attack was the second mass kidnapping in a week in Africa’s most populous state, where heavily armed criminal gangs on motorbikes target victims in villages and schools and along highways in the hunt for ransom payments.
Local government officials in Kaduna State confirmed the kidnapping attack on Kuriga school on March 7, 2024, but they have still not given figures as they said they were still working out how many children had been abducted.
Vice Principal Hassan Yakubu Makuku was shot dead while resisting the attackers, and another staff member sustained gunshot injuries, he added.
Police said additional tactical units, soldiers and local vigilantes have been deployed to comb suspected escape routes and surrounding forests in a search-and-rescue operation.Northwest Nigeria has witnessed repeated school abductions by armed gangs seeking ransom payments, despite government pledges to improve security in the region. Islamist militant group Boko Haram kidnapped 270 schoolgirls in 2014 in the northeastern town of Chibok. While many of the girls managed to escape or were later released, some have never been returned.
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