Armed men abducted 317 students on Friday and a rescue operation is underway, police in northwestern Nigeria said of the country’s latest mass kidnapping.
“The Zamfara State Police Command, in cooperation with the military, has launched a joint rescue operation to rescue the 317 students abducted by the armed bandits of the Government Girls Science Secondary School in Jangebe,” police spokesman Mohammed Shehu said in a statement.
“Unknown armed men came shooting sporadically and abducted the girls,” Sulaiman Tanau Anka, Zamfara State Information Commissioner, told Reuters. “Information available to me said that they came with vehicles and moved the students, they also moved some on foot,” said Anka, adding that security forces were chasing through the area.
“More than 300 girls are not counted according to the number of employees left,” said a teacher at Government Girls Secondary School Jangebe, who asked to remain anonymous.
He said the attack took place around 1 am (12 GMT) but did not provide information on the number of students present at the school at the time, as reported by Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Heavily armed criminal gangs in northwestern and central Nigeria have intensified attacks in recent years, kidnapping for ransom, rape and looting. Just last week, 42 people were taken by a gang from a school in the nearby state of Niger.
In December, more than 300 boys were abducted from a school in Kankara in December, President Muhammadu Buhari’s hometown of Katsina, while visiting the region.
The boys were later released but the incident sparked outrage and memories of kidnappings of schoolgirls by terrorist groups in Dapchi and Chibok that shocked the world.
Security challenge
A parent told AFP that he had received a call about the latest incident in Zamfara.
“I’m on my way to Jangebe. I got a call that the school was being invaded by bandits who took away schoolgirls. I have two daughters at school,” said Sadi Kawaye.
Kidnappings are just a security challenge facing Africa’s most populous country, with militants carrying out a terrorist uprising in the northeast and ethnic tensions simmering in some southern regions.
Northwestern and central Nigeria has increasingly become a hub for large criminal gangs looting villages, killing and abducting residents after looting and torching homes.
Bandits operate from camps in the Rugu forest, which stretches across Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna and Niger. Nigerian armed forces have been deployed there but attacks and mass kidnappings remain. The gangs are largely driven by economic motives and have no known ideological inclination.
But there are concerns that they are being infiltrated by terrorist groups fighting a decades-old conflict that has killed more than 30,000 people and spread to nearby Niger, Chad and Cameroon.
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