- Fifteen children kidnapped in Sokoto
- Gunmen attack, abduct schoolchildren
- Police struggle, roads impede rescue
Approximately fifteen children were abducted from a Nigerian school nearly two days after an estimated three hundred pupils were held hostage.
The occurrence on Saturday represented the third instance of mass abduction in the West African country within a week, following a school attack in which assailants abducted a minimum of 287 students.
Saturday at approximately 1:00 a.m. (UK time), gunmen stormed the village of Gidan Bakuso in the state of Sokoto, according to police spokesman Ahmad Rufa’i.
In addition to capturing the children from their hostel before the arrival of security forces, the group abducted a village woman.
According to Mr Rufa’i, a police tactical squad was dispatched to search for the pupils. However, the area’s inaccessible roads have hampered the rescue operation.
He stated that this is a remote village where vehicles are not permitted. The police detachment was compelled to travel to the town via motorcycles.
According to school proprietor Liman Abubakar Bakuso, Reuters quoted as saying that the gunmen fired intermittently while in the village, causing pupils to flee in terror.
They were successful in abducting fifteen of my pupils, he said, the oldest two being twenty and fifteen years old, while the rest were all under thirteen years old.
We have been fervently praying for their safe release as we have entered a state of despair.
It is the third mass abduction in the West African nation in less than a week; in the previous incident, assailants stormed a school and abducted at least 287 students.
Gunmen reportedly surrounded the school in the town of Kuriga at approximately 8:00 a.m. local time on Thursday, just before the start of classes, according to local sources.
“Every child will be returned,” Uba Sani, the governor of Kaduna, assured villagers on Thursday. “We are working with the security agencies.”
A group suspected of being Islamist insurgents abducted fifty individuals, the majority of whom were women, on March 6 in the desolate Gamboru region, which is situated on the border with Chad and Cameroon.
No group attributed any of the abductions to itself.
Vice President Kashim Shettima of Nigeria met with some parents of the kidnapped Kuriga students on Saturday, reassuring them of his and the organization’s diligent pursuit to locate and rescue the children.
A decade has passed since 276 female students were abducted at night by members of the Islamist militant group Boko Haram, which is the date of the most recent abduction.
Amnesty International reports that over ninety of the abducted pupils remain unaccounted for following their abduction from a government secondary school in Chibokare, Borno state.
Since 2014, approximately 1,500 pupils have been abducted in raids. Abductions have become more prevalent in the northwestern and central regions in recent years, where dozens of armed groups frequently demand exorbitant ransoms from travellers and villagers.
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