Late on the night of April 14, around 100 girls were thought to have been abducted in an attack on a school in northeast Nigeria, the BBC reports, citing officials.
Nigeria (Wikimedia). Lagos is the largest city; Abuja is the capital.
The number was initially higher, over 200 in fact, but some of the girls were found to have returned to their homes. As of Wednesday morning, the military said most of the girls had been freed, but eight of 129 are still missing. And parents say the number is still higher, reports the BBC.
Gunmen, allegedly members of the Islamist group Boko Haram, entered the hostel associated with a school in Chibok, Borno state, and ordered teens into trucks and drove them away.
The group’s name means “Western education is forbidden” in the local Hausa language, and they frequently target schools with their violence.
Boko Haram was also blamed for a deadly attack on male students in the same area, though in the Yobe state, in February, the New York Times reported. At least 29 students, ranging in age from 16 to 18 years, died in that incident, the fourth Boko Haram attack on a school in the preceding year.
Abdulla Bego, a spokesman for the governor of Yobe State, told the Times that the killers had traveled in nine pickup trucks to the attack site, the Federal Government College Buni Yadi. They staged the ambush when soldiers in a military garrison assigned to protect the school were absent, according to the Times.
In Chibok, the gunmen reportedly “stormed the school in a convoy of vehicles,” the AFP news agency quoted Emmanuel Sam, an education official in Chibok, as saying. Many student residents at the hostel were asleep when the attacks occurred, and gunmen were said to have overpowered guards, soldiers deployed for extra security as students prepare for national exams.
