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Bandits have reportedly kidnapped dozens of school children and killed a staff member during a raid on a girls’ secondary school in Kebbi state, northwestern Nigeria, early on Monday, according to police reports.
This latest incident occurred over a decade after nearly 300 girls were taken from Chibok in the volatile northeastern region, which triggered global outrage. Since that time, numerous other abductions involving schoolchildren have taken place.
The police reported that the gang, equipped with “sophisticated weapons,” opened fire indiscriminately while storming the Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School in Kebbi state around 4:00 am (0300 GMT).
Despite police deployment, “unfortunately, the suspected bandits had already scaled through the fence of the school and abducted twenty-five students from their hostel to an unknown destination,” the police said in a statement.
During the assault, the school’s vice principal was shot dead, and a security guard sustained injuries.
Both military and police tactical teams, along with local vigilante groups, have been “dispatched to the area to search the routes used by the bandits and nearby forests” in an effort to rescue the kidnapped students and apprehend the criminals, according to police.
For years, Nigeria’s northwest has experienced a surge in heavily armed criminal gangs referred to as “bandits,” who engage in cattle theft, village raids, kidnapping, and the killing of residents, in addition to looting and burning homes. The northwest has become the region most afflicted by abductions.
Data regarding kidnappings in Nigeria tends to be unreliable, primarily due to under-reporting; however, a report by the charity Save the Children last year revealed that more than 1,680 students had been kidnapped from schools in Nigeria between early 2014 and the end of 2022.
As the country faces security challenges on multiple fronts, hostage-taking has escalated into a nationwide industry and become a common strategy for bandit gangs and jihadists.
In the northwest, authorities have attempted to negotiate with bandits, establishing peace agreements and deploying vigilante groups. Nevertheless, these efforts have yielded limited success, and detractors argue that the kidnapping crisis is spiralling out of control.
