Nigeria Confirms Disappearance of Almost 70 Children in Mass Abduction

Police in Nigeria’s northwestern Zamfara state on Thursday confirmed that at least 68 children remain missing from a school after unknown assailants assaulted the school and abducted them.

Police claimed they managed to rescue five girls in the incident.

“The ongoing search and rescue mission is yielding positive result as five abducted female students were today rescued,” a public relations officer for the Zamfara state police force said in a statement issued September 2. “The victims were medically checked at the hospital, debriefed by the police, and reunited … with their families.”

The Zamfara state police force on September 1 confirmed “the abduction of 73 male and female students” from the Government Day Secondary School in the village of Kaya. The kidnapping took place on Wednesday morning “after an invasion by a large number of armed bandits on the school,” Nigeria’s Vanguard online newspaper reported.

“Following the attack, Zamfara state officials ordered [the] closure of all primary and secondary schools in the state. They also imposed travel restrictions as well as a daily dusk to dawn curfew to prevent further attacks,” Voice of America reported on Thursday.

An unidentified teacher at Kaya’s Government Day Secondary School told Reuters on Thursday “there were still more than 90 [students] missing” from the learning institution “after some students who had escaped were taken into account.”

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said it was notified of the incident on September 1 and learned that unidentified gunmen abducted 100 students between the ages of 14 and 19 years old and an adult teacher from the school in Kaya.

“Of the abducted students, 23 escaped and returned home – two of them with bullet wounds,” UNICEF’s country representative for Nigeria, Peter Haekins, told reporters on September 2.

Northwestern and central Nigeria have suffered from a surge in kidnappings and lootings by criminal gangs, which local media refers to as “bandits,” in recent months. The criminals have increasingly targeted schools for mass abductions, often demanding ransom payments from parents and local government or security forces in exchange for the pupils’ release. Armed criminals have kidnapped roughly 1,100 students from mainly government-run schools across northern Nigeria since December 2020. Unidentified assailants on August 27 released 90 students abducted from an Islamic seminary in Niger state on May 30. The students included children as young as four years old.

The Islamic State-allied terror group Boko Haram carried out Nigeria’s most infamous school kidnapping in April 2014, abducting roughly 270 mainly Christian girls from a government-run secondary school in Chibok, a village located in northeastern Nigeria’s Borno State. Reuters reported in August that about 113 of the kidnapped girls remain unaccounted for. According to the news agency, 82 of the Chibok schoolgirls “were freed in 2017 after mediation, adding to 24 who were released or found. A few others have escaped or been rescued.”

A Chibok schoolgirl most recently resurfaced on July 28, allegedly turning herself over to Nigerian government authorities “alongside someone she was said to have married during her captivity,” and also with “two children she bore during her marriage in captivity,” the Nigerian online newspaper This Day reported.