Lagos, Nov 22, (dpa/GNA) – More than 300 children and young people have been kidnapped from a Catholic boarding school in northern Nigeria, a national church network said on Saturday.
According to the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), a total of 303 pupils, including very young children, and 12 teachers were abducted from the school in the village of Papiri in Niger State.
Armed men reportedly raided the school early on Friday morning.
The abducted children made up about half of the total student body, the local branch of CAN in Niger State said.
The Catholic school has 629 pupils, including 430 primary school children and 199 secondary school students.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack so far. CAN said the school was raided by “suspected terrorists.” A few days earlier, armed men kidnapped 25 schoolgirls from a state boarding school in the neighbouring state of Kebbi.
Criminal gangs and Islamist terrorist groups repeatedly kidnap people in the north and centre of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country with more than 220 million inhabitants.
The most serious kidnapping of this kind was the 2014 attack on a girls’ school in the town of Chibok, which saw Islamist militia Boko Haram abducting 276 schoolgirls. Eighty-two of the girls are still missing today.
Boko Haram and other jihadist groups waging a violent campaign to establish strict Islamic rule in Nigeria, usually use the kidnappings to make political demands.
Criminal gangs, on the other hand, are mostly interested in extorting ransom money or securing the release of their imprisoned members.
GNA