Gunmen are accused of kidnapping more than 200 students in an attack on a school in northwest Nigeria, a teacher and residents say, in one of the largest kidnappings in the country. Mass kidnappings and ransom demands to free kidnapped people are a major problem and affect the entire country, the most populous on the continent. Heavily armed criminal gangs have targeted schools in the past, particularly in the northwest of the country, but such attacks had recently declined.

Local authorities in Kaduna State confirmed the kidnapping that occurred on Thursday March 7 in the Kuriga school, without however specifying the number of kidnapped 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 GSS Kuriga School in Chikun district, the staff managed to escape with many students as the gunmen fired into the air.

“We are trying to determine the real number of children kidnapped,” he told local officials Thursday evening. “At Kuriga secondary school, 187 children were missing, while at primary school 125 children were missing, but 25 returned,” he detailed. “More than 280 children have been kidnapped. We first thought there were 200, but after a careful count we discovered that the kidnapped children are a little more than 280,” Muhammad Adam, a resident, told AFP.

Another resident, Musa Muhammed, reported hearing early in the morning “shooting from bandits, before knowing that they had rounded up the children and kidnapped the students and their teachers, almost 200 people. We implore the government (…) to help us with security.”

The immense challenge of insecurity

For their part, local officials and the police have not released any figures at this stage. “At the moment, we do not know the number of children or students who have been kidnapped,” Kaduna State Governor Uba Sani told reporters on the ground. “No child will be abandoned,” he assured.

Estimates of the number of people kidnapped or missing in Nigeria often drop after those who managed to flee attackers return home. Amnesty International has condemned the kidnappings in Kaduna, calling on Nigerian authorities to better protect schools. “Schools should be places of safety and no child should have to choose between their education and their life,” rights group X said. “Nigerian authorities must take immediate action to prevent attacks on schools,” she added.

Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu came to power in 2023 promising, like his predecessors, to tackle the immense challenge of insecurity, fueled by jihadist groups, bandits in the northeast of the country and the outbreak of intercommunal violence in the central states.

In recent years, hundreds of children and students have been kidnapped in mass kidnappings in northwest and central Nigeria. Most were released after the payment of a ransom, after several weeks or months of captivity in camps hidden in the forests of the northwestern states of the country. In February 2021, armed men attacked a girls’ school in the locality of Jangebe, in the state of Zamfara (North), kidnapping more than 300 people. Since last week, more than 100 women have gone missing in northeastern Nigeria after a mass kidnapping attributed to jihadists.