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The attack on a boarding school for children, located in Northwest Nigeria’s Katsina State, occurred on Friday night. On Saturday, it was unclear how many were abducted, but on Sunday, local police confirmed that some 400 students were missing. According to the source, the school is said to have between just over 600 and almost 900 students.
– Police, Nigerian Army and Air Force work closely with school authorities to determine the exact number of missing and abducted students. Search parties are working to find and rescue them, said Gambo Isah, the local police spokesman, according to The Guardian.
It has been difficult to determine how many children have disappeared after the attack, as it is unclear how many were still in school last Friday. Some students had completed the last exam of the fall term and gone home. The army is now visiting the students’ families to check if the children are at home.
For about an hour it was the school’s armed group, according to witnesses the BBC spoke to. The men carried automatic rifles and searched students’ lockers and demanded money, according to a 13-year-old student from the school who managed to escape the perpetrators, with whom CNN spoke.
“They controlled the group like a shepherd does with a flock of sheep,” the boy told CNN on Saturday.
He says the children were taken outside and the armed men pushed them against the school gates. So the 13-year-old decided to run. He first hid behind a broken school bus and then ran to the school fence where he found a new hiding place. The boy survived, but his cousin and close friend are still missing.
Military declared in on Saturday they found the hideout of the perpetrators and then shots broke out. It is not clear what the attack resulted, but there is no information that any children were injured.
Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari condemned the attack. He asked the school to investigate the incident and said the parents, who rushed to the school after the attack, should contact authorities.
The parents of the abducted children gathered at Kankara are now desperately trying to find out what happened to their children.
“I have been here since yesterday praying that the Almighty Allah saves our people,” a man whose two children, aged 17 and 16, are among those missing, told Reuters.
A mother spoke also with Reuters in Kankara and asked for help from the authorities to recover his son.
“If the government does not help us, we have no power to save our children,” he told Reuters.
Some children, who claimed to have managed to escape, have left the forest where they were taken since Friday night. The killers have not established contact with the authorities or the victims’ families, and therefore the motive is not yet clear.
The attack is believed to have been carried out by one of the criminal gangs operating mainly in northwestern Nigeria and feeding on kidnappings and ransom demands, among other things.
During the attack broke out shootouts between the attackers and school security personnel, during which about 200 students managed to jump over the school fence and to safety, police said in a statement Saturday.
The Kankara school is the latest in a series of Nigerian schools to come under attack. In April 2014, the jihadist group Boko Haram abducted 276 girls from a dormitory at a boarding school in Chibok, northeast Nigeria. About 100 of the girls have yet to be found.
