A group of 24 Nigerian girls who were abducted from their boarding school a week ago have been released, the country’s president said.
On 17 November, armed assailants attacked the Government Girls Comprehensive Senior Secondary School (GGCSS) in Kebbi State, Nigeria, killing one staff member and abducting 25 students. One managed to escape soon thereafter.
Nigerian President Bola Tinubu praised security forces for their “swift response” to the incident – although the circumstances of the girls’ release remained unclear.
Kidnappings have surged in recent years in Africa’s most populous country – with more than 250 children abducted from a Catholic school last Friday still missing.
In a statement, a Special Adviser to the President confirmed that all the girls taken from the school in Kebbi State have been traced, noting that the incident has triggered copycat abductions in two other Nigerian states.
Tinubu said more personnel would be deployed to “unsafe areas” to prevent further incidents of kidnapping.
In a separate post on X, Tinubu wrote: “The Air Force is to maintain constant surveillance over the most remote areas, synchronizing operations with ground units to effectively identify, isolate, disrupt and neutralize all hostile elements.”
More than 1,500 children have been abducted from Nigerian schools since 2014, when 276 girls were abducted during the infamous Chibok mass kidnapping.
On Friday, at least 300 children and staff were abducted from St. Mary’s School, a Catholic boarding school in Nigeria’s Niger state.
Fifty of those abducted from the school have escaped – but at least 250 remain unaccounted for, according to the Christian Association of Nigeria.
The region’s leading Catholic cleric has told the BBC that the Nigerian government is still making “no meaningful effort” to rescue the missing.
The school kidnapping is the third such incident in Nigeria within a week, prompting President Bola Tinubu to cancel a trip to the G20 summit in South Africa over the weekend to deal with the crisis.
UN Education Envoy Gordon Brown called on the international community to “do its best” to support efforts to return abducted children.
Former British Prime Minister Brown said: “We also have a responsibility to ensure that Nigerian schools are safe places to learn, not places where children can be pulled out of their classrooms for criminal gain.”
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