KADUNA, Oct 5 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Gunmen kidnapped six schoolgirls and two staff members from a boarding school in northern Nigeria on Thursday, police said.
Police said the girls and staff were taken in the early morning from a school called Engravers College in a remote area near the village of Kakau Daji in Kaduna state.
It was not immediately clear who had taken them. While the militant group Boko Haram and a branch of Daesh are active in northern Nigeria, kidnappings by other armed groups are also rampant — mostly for ransom.
A police spokesperson Yakubu Sabo said armed men gained entry on Thursday into the Engravers College, a mixed boarding school in a remote area south of the city of Kaduna.
They “took away two staff of the college and six female students to an unknown destination”, Sabo said.
“The Kaduna state police command has mobilised and dispatched some operatives with a view to trail the perpetrators of this crime and rescue the victims and apprehend the criminals. The operation is still ongoing,” he said.
“Unknown gunmen broke into the school around 00:10 (23:10 GMT) and took away six female students and two staff who live inside the school,” Elvis Allah-Yaro, a school official, said.
Abductions for ransom are common in Nigeria and the highway from the capital Abuja to the city of Kaduna has seen a surge in attacks by armed criminals, but raids on schools are rare.
In 2014, the armed group Boko Haram abducted 276 schoolgirls from the remote northeastern town of Chibok in the Borno state.
About 100 of those schoolgirls remain missing.
Last week, police in the city of Kaduna freed hundreds of men and boys from a purported religious school where they had been beaten and abused. — NNN-AGENCIES
