Nigerian Gunmen Kidnap Primary-School Teachers in Latest Abduction Surge in armed militancy has worsened security in northwest Nigeria, where kidnapping for ransom has become a lucrative industry
Gunmen kidnapped three teachers from a primary school in northwestern Nigeria on Monday, government officials said, as parents of students kidnapped in another school four days earlier staged a protest demanding the government bring their children home safely.
Samuel Aruwan, the security commissioner for Kaduna state, initially said that authorities had received reports that both pupils and teachers had been abducted on Monday morning in the Birnin Gwari area, but later issued a statement to say the missing children had escaped. A local vigilante group who was hunting for the kidnappers said it would take until Tuesday morning to say definitively that none of the students had been abducted.
The victims’ families said the gunmen arrived Monday morning, shortly after school gates had opened, and attacked the school. Primary schools in Nigeria usually admit children between 6 and 9 years old.
“They came to the village looking like normal people and one of them drew a gun from his caftan and started firing before moving to the school,” said Abduljalal Usman, the elder brother of one of the abducted teachers.
It was the fifth mass school abduction since December in Nigeria’s northwest, where a surge in armed militancy has led to worsening security and kidnapping for ransom become a lucrative industry.
State governors publicly deny paying to free hostages. But security analysts said kidnapping for ransom was becoming one of the fastest-growing businesses in Nigeria, a U.S. counterterrorism ally that is already dealing with a 10-year jihadist rebellion as well as swelling banditry and lawlessness.
Since December, heavily armed gangs have abducted and then ransomed off more than 800 Nigerian schoolchildren, rocking Africa’s most populous country and drawing calls for urgent action from the U.S., the European Union and Pope Francis.
Hundreds of school campuses have been closed across four states for fear of more attacks, leaving an estimated 20 million Nigerian children out of school, the highest total in the world due to terrorism and criminality.
On Friday, 39 students were taken from a forestry college in Kaduna. On Saturday, they appeared in a video surrounded by masked men holding Kalashnikovs and pleaded with the government to pay a ransom of 500 million naira, equivalent to around $1.3 million.
On Monday, parents and teaching unions gathered for a protest called #BringBackOurStudents, a reframing #BringBackOurGirls campaign of 2014, ignited by the abduction of 276 girls from the town of Chibok, that prompted an intervention by the U.S.
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