Armed assailants have carried out an attack on a secondary school in northwestern Nigeria, resulting in the abduction of 25 schoolgirls and the shooting of a staff member, as reported by the authorities.
The incident occurred at the Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School in Maga, Kebbi state, around 4:00 am local time on Monday, according to the police. The attackers, armed with advanced weaponry, clashed with police officers on duty before breaching the school’s perimeter and taking the twenty-five students from their dormitory to an undisclosed location, as detailed in a police statement.
During the assault, the school’s deputy head was fatally shot, and a security guard sustained gunshot injuries, according to a United Nations report. Law enforcement agencies, along with the military and local vigilantes, have mobilized in the region to search the bandits’ known routes and nearby forests in an effort to locate the abducted girls and apprehend the perpetrators, commonly referred to as bandits.
Nigeria has been grappling with armed conflicts since the emergence of the Boko Haram group in 2009, particularly in the northeast, leading to a persistent issue of hostage-taking in schools in the northern regions.
The infamous abduction of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok in Borno state in 2014 garnered international attention, giving rise to the social media campaign “#BringBackOurGirls.” Unfortunately, nearly a hundred of the girls are still unaccounted for. In a similar vein, over 100 students and staff members were taken from a government college in Kebbi state in June 2021, with some being released gradually over a two-year span following ransom payments, while others faced forced marriages or returned with infants.
In a subsequent incident a month later, 140 students from Bethel Baptist School in Kaduna state were kidnapped by armed individuals. The students were released in batches as ransom demands were met in the ensuing months.
According to a report by Save the Children published last year, more than 1,680 students were abducted from Nigerian schools between early 2014 and the end of 2022, underscoring the severity of the issue plaguing the education system in the country.