LAGOS: Gunmen from a criminal gang kidnapped 25 people and killed a staff member in an early morning raid on a north-western Nigerian girls’ secondary school on Monday.

The attack comes more than a decade after 276 girls were abducted from Chib­ok, in the restive northeastern Borno state, and sparked international outcry that rallied people around the “#BringBackOurGirls” global social media campaign.

Since then, there has been a string of other abductions involving schoolchildren across northern parts of Nigeria.

Police said on Monday said the gang armed with “sophisticated weapons, shooting sporadically, stormed the Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School” in Kebbi state at 4am.

Police were deployed, but “unfortunately, the suspected bandits had already scaled through the fence of the school and abducted twenty-five students from their hostel to unknown destination”, police said in a statement.

The school deputy head was shot dead while a security guard was injured during the attack.

The military, police tactical units and local vigilantes have “been deployed in the area and they are currently combing the bandits’ routes and nearby forest” in a bid to rescue the abducted students and arrest the gangs, police said.

Hostage-taking spiralling

Nigeria’s northwest has for years been seeing a rise in heavily armed criminal gangs known as “bandits” who steal cattle, raid villages, kidnap and kill residents and loot and burn homes. It has become the region most affected by kidnappings.

Africa’s most populous country has also been plagued by armed violence since the 2009 emergence of the Boko Haram group in the Lake Chad basin, in the northeast of the country.

Published in Dawn, November 18th, 2025