The “mass kidnapping” of students from public schools in Nigeria is “becoming a norm” in the country, the Nigerian online newspaper Premium Times reported on Tuesday.
“The country has witnessed at least 11 cases of kidnapping of pupils and students from their schools since 2014. Over 700 students and pupils have been kidnapped since December 2020,” according to the Premium Times.
“The mass kidnapping of students from their schools is becoming a norm in Nigeria, particularly in the northern part of the country,” the publication concluded.
Nigeria’s most infamous school kidnapping took place at a government boarding school in the northeastern Nigerian town of Chibok in April 2014. The Islamist terror group Boko Haram raided the secondary school and abducted 267 mostly Christian girls. More than 100 of the kidnapped girls remain missing.
Boko Haram, which loosely translates to “Western education is forbidden,” has waged an Islamist insurgency across northern Nigeria and neighboring states surrounding Lake Chad since about 2009. The jihadist group has traditionally targeted government-run schools in Nigeria as part of its stated effort to eradicate Western culture from the country. Boko Haram has made a resurgence in recent months, carrying out terror attacks and kidnappings across Nigeria with increased frequency.
Unidentified gunmen on June 17 “attacked the Federal Government College Birnin-Yauri, a secondary school in Kebbi State, and abducted dozens of students from their dormitories,” the Premium Times reported on June 22.
“The armed bandits killed a police officer and kidnapped at least 80 students and five teachers during the attack,” according to the news site. “Three of the students are dead, according to the BBC Hausa. Security forces continued their search and, by Sunday morning [June 20], authorities were still counting the missing.”
The attack in northwestern Nigeria’s Kebbi state took place “just over three weeks after 169 students were abducted by armed bandits from an Islamic school in Niger State,” the Premium Times noted on June 22, adding, “Those abducted pupils are yet to be released at the time of this report.”
The Premium Times referred to a mass kidnapping of students from the Salihu Tanko Islamic School in the town of Tegina in western Nigeria’s Niger state on May 30. An unverified number of unidentified gunmen stormed Tegina on motorcycles and terrorized the town before raiding a local Islamic school.
“The bandits reportedly seized the police station in the town and went round the town shooting sporadically into the air to scare residents before breaking into a private school where they abducted children attending Islamic lectures,” the Premium Times reported on May 30.
“[T]he bandits … were able to separate the smaller children from the elderly and strong ones, taking away those in the latter group to an unknown destination,” Nigeria’s This Day reported on May 30, citing the accounts of eyewitnesses.
“One person was shot dead while another was critically injured after gunmen attacked the school at about 4:30 pm yesterday,” This Day revealed on May 31, without disclosing the victims’ ages.
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