ABUJA, Nigeria — Gunmen attacked a college in the Nigerian state of Niger early on Wednesday, killing at least one particular pupil and abducting extra than forty persons, like college students and teachers, in accordance to an official, a instructor and a prefect.
The gunmen, believed to be bandits, fatally shot one particular pupil throughout the episode, which occurred at the Government Science School, Kagara. Community reviews mentioned that about 26 college students and sixteen staff members and family members members had been abducted, and the authorities had been striving to get actual numbers.
The gunmen chased the college students across the college and shot one particular of them in the head as he experimented with to escape, the school’s head prefect, Awal Abdulrahman, mentioned.
A instructor at the college, Aliyu Isah, mentioned the gunmen entered the college premises at about one:thirty a.m. dressed in military camouflage. He mentioned they had forced him to lead them to the students’ sleeping quarters, the place he and some college students had been then tied up in pairs.
“They informed the college students not to get worried, that they had been soldiers,” he mentioned, incorporating that some of the gunmen had been sporting army uniforms.
“They gathered all the college students outdoors, but some ran into the bush,” Mr. Isah mentioned. “I was pondering I would not be capable to escape, but the good news is sufficient Allah gave me a way to escape from them and I assisted the college students that we had been tied collectively.”
In response to the assault, Niger State’s governor, Abubakar Sani Bello, closed the state’s colleges and identified as on President Muhammadu Buhari for support to boost safety.
Mr. Buhari directed the armed forces and police to be certain the fast and safe and sound return of all individuals abducted, a presidential spokesman, Garba Shehu, mentioned in a statement.
The president also sent a staff of safety chiefs to coordinate the rescue operation and meet with state officials, local community leaders, and the school’s mother and father and personnel, in accordance to Mr. Shehu.
“President Buhari has assured of the assistance of his administration to the armed forces in their brave struggle towards terrorism and banditry, and urged them to do all that can be carried out to carry an finish to this saga and steer clear of this kind of cowardly attacks on colleges in the potential,” he mentioned.
The assault came two months soon after gunmen abducted extra than 300 schoolboys from a secondary college in Katsina State in northern Nigeria. The college students had been later on launched.
It also occurred 3 days soon after gunmen attacked a bus belonging to the Niger State Transport Authority and abducted at least 21 passengers. On Tuesday, a statement from the workplace of the state’s information and facts commissioner, Mohammed Idris, mentioned that ten persons had been freed from individuals kidnappers. He mentioned that no ransom was paid to safe their release.
No group instantly claimed duty for the most current abduction in Kagara.
Nigeria’s jihadist rebels, Boko Haram, oppose Western-type schooling and in the previous have carried out mass abductions of schoolchildren as component of a violent campaign to set up an Islamic state in Nigeria.
Numerous extremely organized armed groups, locally identified as bandits, generally abduct college students for cash.