ABUJA, Nigeria — Gunmen attacked a high school in northwestern Nigeria before dawn on Monday and abducted 25 schoolgirls, police said. One staffer at the school was killed and another was wounded in what was the latest incident of school abductions in Nigeria’s northern region.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the abductions from the boarding school in Kebbi state.
According to police, the incident took place at 4:00 a.m. and the girls were abducted from their dorms. The boarding school is in Maga, in the state’s Danko-Wasagu area, police spokesperson Nafi’u Abubakar Kotarkoshi said.
The assailants were armed with “sophisticated weapons” and exchanged fire with guards before abducting the girls, Kotarkoshi said.
“A combined team is currently combing suspected escape routes and surrounding forests in a coordinated search and rescue operation aimed at recovering the abducted students and arresting the perpetrators,” the spokesperson added.
This is the latest school abduction in Nigeria’s northern region, where armed groups have targeted school children since 2014, when the militant Boko Haram group abducted 276 students from Chibok in Borno state.
Kidnappings have become common in parts of northern Nigeria, where dozens of armed groups take advantage of a limited security presence to carry out attacks on villages and along major roads. Most victims are released only after the payment of ransoms that sometimes run into the thousands of dollars.
In March 2024, more than 130 schoolchildren were rescued after spending more than two weeks in captivity in the Nigerian state of Kaduna.
The mass abduction of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok marked the beginning of a new era of fear — with nearly 100 of the girls still in captivity in 2024.
Since the Chibok abductions, at least 1,500 students have been kidnapped, as armed groups increasingly find in abductions a lucrative way to fund other crimes and control villages in the nation’s mineral-rich but poorly policed region.
