Gunmen kidnapped 317 girls from a boarding school in northwest Nigeria, police said Friday, the latest in a rising tide of high-school abductions across Africa’s most populous nation, where kidnapping for ransom has become a lucrative industry.
Dozens of armed militants broke into the Government Girls Secondary School, Jangebe, in Zamfara state at around 1 a.m. Friday and began shooting before packing schoolgirls onto vehicles or walking them toward the nearby Rugu forest, which spreads over three states and hundreds of miles, according to a report by Wall Street Journal.
By morning, parents and community leaders were tallying the number of people missing. The Zamfara police said security forces, backed by reinforcements, were in pursuit of the abductors.
The abduction is the second in a little over a week in Nigeria’s northwest, where a surge in armed militancy has led to a worsening breakdown of security.
Dozens of schoolboys and staff are still missing after being kidnapped from another school, the Kagara Government Science College in Niger state on Feb. 17. In December, 344 boys were taken from a school in nearby Katsina and freed after a week. Three of the abducted boys told The Wall Street Journal that the kidnappers told them a ransom had been paid for their release. Government officials denied paying a ransom and said the kidnappers released the schoolboys because the military had surrounded them.
The Zamfara governor, Bello Matawalle, announced that he had closed all schools in the state. President Muhammadu Buhari said in a statement that his administration “will not succumb to blackmail by bandits who target innocent school students in the hope of massive ransom payments.”
There was no claim of responsibility. Analysts said the culprits were likely one of the heavily armed bandit groups that have become increasingly powerful across swaths of Nigeria’s northwest, and not the jihadist groups based in the northeast.
The number of children out of school in the country has risen to more than 10.5 million, the highest in the world , according to the United Nations, due to metastasizing insecurity across the country’s north. “One in every five of the world’s out-of-school children is in Nigeria,” the agency said in a recent report.
Some Nigerian lawmakers have called for investigations into the Safe Schools Initiative amid allegations of mismanagement, but no investigation has been authorized by the government.