50 Children Manage to Escape After Mass Abduction at Nigerian School
Gunmen seized 300+ students; dozens flee, hundreds still trapped.
In a meticulously planned dawn raid on Friday, heavily armed gunmen stormed St. Mary’s Co-Educational School in the remote Papiri community of Niger State, forcibly abducting 303 students aged between eight and eighteen along with twelve teachers, marking one of the largest single mass kidnappings in Nigeria’s history and stripping the boarding school of nearly half its 629 pupils.
By Sunday, the Christian Association of Nigeria confirmed that at least fifty of the abducted children had managed to escape their captors in the dense forests surrounding the area, reuniting with distraught families, while President Bola Tinubu announced the recovery of 51 students and the successful rescue of all 38 worshippers taken during a separate violent church attack in Kwara State that left two dead and services interrupted by live gunfire.
The assault on St. Mary’s follows a chilling pattern of criminal gangs targeting isolated boarding schools with minimal security presence across northern Nigeria, exploiting the region’s porous terrain for ransom operations; days earlier, gunmen abducted 25 girls from a secondary school in neighbouring Kebbi State, with only one managing to flee while security forces claim to have located the remaining hostages’ hideouts.
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President Tinubu has mobilised elite tactical units and local vigilante hunters for intensive pursuit and rescue operations across multiple states, reiterating an uncompromising commitment to national security amid a decade-long epidemic of school abductions that began with Boko Haram’s 2014 seizure of 276 Chibok girls and has since morphed into widespread banditry claiming tens of thousands of lives and displacing over two million people.
International outrage has intensified, with Pope Leo XIV issuing a heartfelt appeal for the immediate release of all hostages during Sunday’s Angelus, US President Donald Trump branding the attacks a “disgrace” and threatening direct military intervention over perceived persecution of Christians, while prominent Nigerians including WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and #BringBackOurGirls co-founder Aisha Yesufu condemned persistent governmental inaction and demanded systemic measures to end the terror gripping the nation’s educational institutions.
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