Gunmen have kidnapped 317 girls from boarding school in northwestern Nigeria, police said in a statement Friday, the latest in a rising wave of high school kidnappings in Africa’s most populous country, where ransom kidnapping has become a lucrative industry.
Armed militants broke into Government Girls Secondary School, Jangebe, Zamfara State on Friday around 1 a.m. and packed school girls in vehicles or took them to the nearby Rugu Forest, which spans three states and hundreds of miles. By morning, community leaders were still counting the number of missing.
Ahmad Abdullahi, a parent, said his daughter had escaped but that five of his nieces, aged between 14 and 17, were among the missing.
The news marks the second such kidnapping in just over a week in northwestern Nigeria, where a wave of armed militancy has led to a deterioration in security.
Dozens of schoolboys and staff are still missing after being kidnapped from another school, Kagara Government Science College in the state of Niger, on February 17. Government officials have said they are negotiating with the kidnappers to bring the victims home.
An armored personnel carrier stationed at Government Science College in Kagara after gunmen abducted dozens of students and staff earlier this month.
Photo:
kola sulaimon / Agence France-Presse / Getty Images
There was no immediate response from the federal government and no liability claims were made. Analysts said the perpetrators were likely one of the heavily armed bandit groups that have become increasingly powerful in parts of northwestern Nigeria, not the jihadist groups in the northeast.
“Ransom kidnapping is now the most thriving industry in Nigeria,” said Bulama Bukarti, a terrorism analyst and columnist with the Daily Trust, the most popular newspaper in Northern Nigeria.
Nigerian officials are divided between those who support a dialogue with the criminal groups seizing the school children and those who support a zero-tolerance approach.
More than 300 schoolboys were received by government officials in Nigeria after being released by their kidnappers. The jihadist group Boko Haram had claimed responsibility for kidnapping them. (Originally published December 18, 2020)
President Muhammadu Buhari has quietly dropped his claim that the country’s uprisings have been technically defeated and has admitted that the country is in “a state of emergency”. The country, which has one of the strongest armies in Africa and is a strong counter-terrorism ally of the US, is struggling to contain multiple threats: a 10-year jihadist uprising, and growing banditry and lawlessness that have spread in a conflict of overlapping militant groups.
After months of criticism over growing insecurity in the country’s northern states, Buhari reluctantly agreed in January to reshuffle his military chiefs.
Shehu Sani, a former senator who studied as a boy in the city of Kagara, said the groups targeted children because they brought in the highest ransom.
“We are stuck in the most vicious circle,” he said. “We need help to acquire new technologies to beat this – and to find the kids that these people have taken.”
Write to Joe Parkinson at [email protected]
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