Gunmen attacked a girls’ boarding school in Kebbi State, northwestern Nigeria, in the early hours of Monday (17). Police said they killed the school’s deputy principal and kidnapped 25 students.
The attackers, armed with rifles and apparently using coordinated tactics, invaded the State Comprehensive Girls’ High School in the city of Maja, at around 4 a.m. local time (0000 Brasilia time). Navio Abubakar Kutarkoshi, police spokesman, said the gunmen exchanged gunfire with police before climbing the school wall and taking the students from their accommodation.
The school’s deputy principal was shot dead, and a security guard was injured during the attack.
Kebbi police said soldiers were deployed to search escape routes and nearby forests in a search and rescue operation.
The group “carried out a careful search of the roads used by the bandits and the surrounding forest” with the aim of “rescuing the kidnapped students and trying to stop the perpetrators of this heinous act.”
In Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, schools have become frequent targets of armed groups, which often carry out kidnappings in search of ransom or an advantage in negotiations with the government.
The violence, initially linked to conflicts over land and water rights between herders and farmers, has turned into clashes linked to organized crime, with groups taking control of rural communities where the government has little or no presence.
The scenario has worsened since the emergence of the Boko Haram group, in 2009, in the Lake Chad basin in the northeast of the country.
The country is still traumatized by the mass kidnapping that gained international notoriety in April 2014. The Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram kidnapped 276 girls from a school in Chibok, sparking a global campaign for their release. Ten years later, 112 girls are still missing, and the government considers this issue forgotten.
According to the NGO Human Rights Watch, Nigeria in 2021 adopted policies to increase security in schools and the ability of these institutions to respond to attacks of this kind, among other measures. About US$315 million (R$1.9 billion), in value terms at the time, would have been invested in the initiative, with a further US$24 million (R$145 million) to be announced in 2023 – although there are few details about implementation and little clarity around the project.
This measure proved ineffective, as the practice increased again in 2024. In just one week in March, at least 564 people were kidnapped, according to the UN human rights agency. In March, armed men forcibly took about 300 children from villages in northern Kaduna state in separate incidents.
There is no talk about Boko Haram’s role in these kidnappings, but rather about the gangs that make paying ransom a lucrative business.
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