KANO | Three hundred and seventeen teenage girls were kidnapped after the attack on their boarding school on the night of Thursday to Friday by armed men in northwestern Nigeria, local police said on Friday, adding that a rescue operation has been launched.
“Zamfara State Police and Army have launched a joint operation to rescue 317 students kidnapped by armed bandits from Jangebe Girls’ Boarding School,” local police spokesman Mohammed Shehu said. , quoted in a press release.
At 1 a.m., armed men drove into this middle school in Zamfara State and stormed the dormitories. They left with hundreds of young girls on foot, according to local authorities.
A team of “heavily armed security forces has been dispatched to Jangebe to support the ongoing rescue operation at the scene where the schoolgirls are said to have been taken,” the police spokesman added.
This kidnapping is the latest in a series of kidnappings of adolescents perpetrated in central and north-western Nigeria by criminal groups, known locally as “bandits”, who terrorize populations, steal livestock and loot villages. .
Last week, 42 children were abducted in Niger State, in west-central Nigeria, and more than 300 boys were also abducted in early December in Kankara in Katsina State.
These criminal gangs often hide in camps in the Rugu Forest, which spans four states in northern and central Nigeria: Katsina, Zamfara, Kaduna, and Niger.
These criminal gangs are motivated by greed, but some have forged strong links with jihadist groups present in the northeast.
This criminal violence has killed more than 8,000 people since 2011, and forced more than 200,000 people to flee their homes, according to a report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) think tank published in May 2020.