Forty-six people, most of them children, were kidnapped during a rare attack on three schools in southwest Nigeria last week, the Christian Association of Nigeria said on Monday.
Nigeria is battling a scourge of criminal gangs known as bandits who kidnap for ransom and target poorly policed rural areas.
- Hormuz tanker traffic edges higher after wartime low
- First attack on Arab nuclear site sends warning to Gulf, US
But most attacks, including school kidnappings, have happened in the north and centre of the country, where the conflict with the gangs is most prominent.
Elisha Olukayode Ogundiya, the Christian association chairman in Oyo state, said that “46 persons, mostly children” aged from two to 16 were seized in the attacks in the southwestern state on Friday.
In what police on Friday called a “coordinated attack”, gunmen simultaneously raided Baptist Nursery and Primary in Yawota, and two other schools in Esiele, seizing pupils and teachers.
President Bola Tinubu on Monday condemned the attack as “barbaric”, while promising that the federal government was working with the Oyo state to “rescue all the victims”.
“We expect a breakthrough soon,” he said in a statement released by his office but made no reference to a similar kidnapping that occurred last week in northeastern Borno state.
No group has claimed responsibility for the Oyo state attack, but the governor Seyi Makinde said late on Sunday that seven teachers were captured and one was killed by the “terrorists”, suspected to be fleeing intensified military operations in the country’s northwest.
“With the pressure on the terrorists and the bandits in the northwest, they will keep moving southward,” the governor said.
School kidnappings are rare in Oyo, one of Nigeria’s most populous states and whose capital Ibadan is a major educational hub.
Five forest guards were killed at a game reserve in the state in January, in an attack the police said was carried out by an “armed banditry syndicate”.
The latest abduction brings to nearly 90 the number of people missing from schools across the country after attacks last week.
Kidnapping for ransom has become almost a daily occurrence in the west African nation.
At least 42 children were taken from a school in the violence-battered Borno state last week, according to a local lawmaker.
At least 10 of the children kidnapped from Mussa village were aged between two and three years, according to a list shared by one of the community members.
Swathes of the rural countryside remain outside, or barely under, government control.
Nearly 300 students and teachers were snatched from a Catholic boarding school in northern Kaduna state late last year.
