A schoolgirl who was abducted with 24 others from a dormitory in northwestern Nigeria has escaped and is safe, the school's principal told the AP on Tuesday, as hunters joined security forces in the search for the missing students in forests close to the school. The girls were kidnapped before dawn on Monday, when gunmen attacked the dorm at the Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School in Kebbi state's Maga town. Local police said the gunmen scaled the fence to enter the school premises and exchanged gunfire with police officers before seizing the girls and killing a staff member.
The student who escaped arrived home late Monday, hours after the kidnapping, said principal Musa Rabi Magaji. Another student was able to escape the gunmen in the minutes after the raid and was not abducted, the principal said. A video verified by AP shows the two schoolgirls, who appear to be in their early teens, lost in their thoughts and surrounded by family and other villagers, their hijabs covering their heads. Security forces, vigilantes and hunters, meanwhile, have intensified efforts to find and rescue the others, local officials said. Security teams swept nearby forests where gangs often hide while others were deployed along major roads leading to the school.
"We must find these children," said Nigeria's Chief of Army Staff Lt. Gen. Waidi Shaibu. "Success is not optional." No group has claimed responsibility for taking the girls, but analysts and locals say it could be one of several gangs that often target schools, travelers, and remote villagers in kidnappings for ransoms. Authorities have identified the gangs as mostly former herders who have taken up arms against farming communities after clashes between them over increasingly strained resources. The wife of the school's vice principal and chief security officer, who was killed in the attack, notes the assailants asked for him by name. "They told him that we are here to kill you," she told the AP.
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