Dozens of children were abducted by gunmen from an Islamic seminary in central Nigeria, in the latest mass kidnapping in Africa’s most populous nation.
About 200 children were at school in Niger on Sunday during the attack, the local government tweeted and added that “an unconfirmed number” were taken. The abduction came a day after 14 students from a university in northwestern Nigeria were released after 40 days in captivity, one of a series of kidnappings targeted at colleges and schools since December.
Police spokesman Wasiu Abiodun in Niger said the attackers arrived on motorcycles and started firing indiscriminately, killing one resident and injuring another before kidnapping children from Salihu Tanko Islamic School.
One of the school officials, who asked not to be named, said the attackers initially took more than 100 children “but later sent back those they considered too small for them, those between four and 12 years old.”
The state government said in a series of tweets that the attackers had dropped 11 of the students who were “too small and could not walk” very far. In a later Twitter thread, the state added that Governor Sani Bello had instructed “security agencies to return (the) children as soon as possible.”
The kidnappings in northwestern and central Nigeria complicate the challenges facing President Muhammadu Buhari’s security forces, who are fighting a more than decade-long extremist uprising in the northeast.
Armed gangs, locally known as bandits, terrorize residents of northwestern and central Nigeria by looting villages, stealing cattle and taking people hostage for ransom.
Since December 2020, before the attack on Sunday, 730 children and students had been kidnapped. Gangs have often targeted schools in remote areas, where students live in dormitories with little security protection, before taking their victims deep into nearby forests to negotiate.
On April 20, gunmen stormed Greenfield University in northwestern Nigeria, kidnapping about 20 students and killing one of the school’s employees in the attack. Five students were executed a few days later to force families and the government to pay a ransom. Fourteen were released on Saturday.
Nigeria has been plagued by kidnappings for several years, with criminals largely targeting the rich and prominent. But recently, the poor have also fallen victim. Earlier this month, hundreds of protesters partially blocked a highway into the capital Abuja after a series of kidnappings in the area.
The criminal gangs maintain camps in the Rugu forest that stretches across the northern and central states of Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna and Niger. Their motives have been economic without ideological inclinations.
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