Gunmen have kidnapped more than 300 schoochildren and teachers in one of the largest mass kidnappings in Nigeria, a Christian group said Saturday. No group has yet claimed responsibility for what is the second abduction in a week in Africa's most populous nation.
A total of 303 schoolchildren and 12 teachers were abducted by gunmen during Friday morning's raid on St Mary's co-education school in Nigeria's Niger State, in the central western part of the country.
The attack came after gunmen on Monday stormed a secondary school in neighbouring Kebbi state, abducting 25 girls.
The students from St Mary's, which has a total student population of 629, were both male and female and ranged in age from 10 to 18.
Local police said they have deployed a team to rescue them.
Residents described scenes of panic as families searched for their missing children.
The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) had earlier reported 227 people had been abducted, but the figure was changed "after a verification exercise and a final census was carried out", according to a statement issued by the Most Reverend Bulus Dauwa Yohanna, chairman of the Niger State chapter of CAN, and who visited the school on Friday.
The revised number surpasses the 276 abducted during the Chibok mass abduction of 2014.
Schools shut
Niger State governor Mohammed Umar Bago, whose government had ordered some schools shut, also ordered the closure of all schools in his state, a day after authorities in the nearby states of Katsina and Plateau shuttered all theirs as a precautionary measure.
The national education ministry has also ordered 47 boarding secondary schools across the country be shut.
President Bola Tinubu has cancelled international engagements, including attending the G20 summit in Johannesburg, to handle the crisis. He has yet to comment publicly.
The attack comes just days after armed men on Monday stormed a secondary school in the Kebbi State, northwestern Nigeria, which is majority Muslim. Of the 25 schoolgirls abducted, one girl has escaped but the other 24 are still missing.
The two kidnapping operations and an attack on a church in the west of the country, in which two people were killed, have happened since US President Donald Trump threatened military action over what he called targeted killings of Nigerian Christians by radical Islamists in Nigeria.
Nigeria's government says Trump's claims that Christians face persecution in Nigeria are a misrepresentation of the country's complex security challenges and that Muslims are the majority of victims of attacks by armed groups.
No group has claimed the latest attacks but bandit gangs seeking ransom payments often target schools in rural areas where security is weak.
US lawmakers split over Trump's claim of Christian persecution in Nigeria
The Kebbi school attack was the 12th mass abduction of schoolchildren in Nigeria that has led to the kidnapping of over 1,600 students in 12 different incidents, lawyer and security analyst Bulama Bukarti told Nigeria's Channels Television.
The latest attack brings the total to 13.
The country is still scarred by the kidnapping of nearly 300 girls by Boko Haram jihadists at Chibok in northeastern Borno state. Some of those girls are still missing.
(with newswires)
