More than 300 schoolgirls kidnapped in northwest Nigeria

Police said gunmen targeted a secondary school

(Reuters )

Gunmen have kidnapped 317 schoolgirls in the town of Jangebe in Zamfara, northwest Nigeria, police said.

Armed bandits fired sporadically during the late-night attack on the Government Girls Science Secondary School, according to Zamfara’s information commissioner Sulaiman Tanau Anka.

“Information available to me said they came with vehicles and moved the students, they also moved some on foot,” he added.

Zamfara Police are currently searching for the missing girls along with the military.

It is not immediately clear who was responsible for the kidnapping.

Militant Islamist group Boko Haram and a branch of Islamic State are active in northern Nigeria, but kidnapping by other armed groups – mostly for ransom – are increasingly common.

This is the second kidnapping in the country in little over a week. On 17 February, unidentified gunmen killed a student and kidnapped 42 people in an overnight attack on a boarding school in Niger, central-northern Nigeria.

27 of the people kidnapped from the Government Science college in the Kagara district were students, three were staff and 12 were members of their families. The hostages are yet to be released.

In December, around 350 schoolboys who were kidnapped from their school in Katsina, northwest Nigeria, were rescued and escorted home by soldiers and armed police.

The boys had been abducted by gunmen on motorbikes, who marched them into the Rugu forest. One of the boys later told Channels TV that it was cold in the forest and that their captors fed them bits of bread and cassava.

A man identifying himself as Nigeria’s leader of Boko Haram, whose name means ‘Western education is forbidden’, claimed responsibility for the abduction in an unverified audio recording.

The kidnapping evoked painful memories of the abduction of almost 300 schoolgirls from Chibok, northeast Nigeria by Boko Haram in 2014. Only around half of the girls initially kidnapped have been found or released.

The spate of abductions have increased pressure on authorities to tackle the issue of growing militancy in the north of the African country.