ABUJA, June 18 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Gunmen attacked a college in northwestern Nigeria on Thursday, and three teachers and an unknown number of students are missing, police said.
The attack on the Federal Government College in Kebbi State was the third assault by kidnap gangs on a school or college in Nigeria in less than a month.
Kebbi State police said one officer was killed and one student was injured in Thursday’s attack.
Security forces were tracking the assailants to try to rescue of the missing students and teachers, the Kebbi state police statement said.
“Following the attack, three teachers and yet to be ascertained number of students are still missing,” it said.
Police would not say how many students were at the college at the time of the attack.
According to local residents, the attackers shot and injured five people, including four students.
They also ransacked the hostels and vandalised student personal effects.
Heavily armed criminal gangs, known locally as bandits, have long targeted central and northwestern states, raiding villages, stealing cattle and kidnapping for ransom.
But they have increasingly targeted schools, snatching students or schoolchildren and herding them into forest hideouts to negotiate ransom payments.
At the end of May, gunmen seized 136 children from an Islamic seminary in central Nigeria’s Niger state.
More than 700 children and students have already been kidnapped by gunmen for ransom since December.
Mass kidnappings are just one challenge for President Muhammadu Buhari’s security forces, which are also fighting a jihadist conflict in the northeast and rising separatist tensions in the country’s southeast. — NNN-AGENCIES