Gunmen Reportedly Kidnap 150 Students from School in Nigeria

Distraught and heartbroken parents have told news agencies in Nigeria that their children have been plucked overnight from a boarding school and kidnapped.

Around 150 students are believed to have been taken by armed men from the hostel at Bethel Baptist High School in Kaduna state, sometime between 11pm on Sunday night and 4am Monday.

The missing students were apparently due to begin exams today. One member of staff said she was left behind after she told the kidnappers that she was unwell. She said they took a box of money from the school as well. About 25 others also managed to escape.

The modus operandi of these ‘bandits’ is to demand ransom money. Since December there have been TEN similar mass kidnappings from schools in northwest Nigeria (with 150 of the 1,000 kidnapped still missing), and over the weekend they even abducted six hospital staff and patients including a one-year-old child.

There are no photos or video footage on Twitter as the government last month banned Twitter after it removed a post by the president.

Police and military personnel are reportedly in “hot pursuit” of the armed men (known as bandits).

According to a police statement the gunmen entered the premise, shooting wildly, and “overpowered the school’s security guards and made their way into the students hostel where they abducted an unspecified number of students into the forest”.

The most famous school kidnapping in Nigeria remains that by Boko Haram in 2014 when 270 schoolgirls were kidnapped. Tragically 100 of them are still missing.

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Video from May 2021