Nigerian authorities said on Sunday they had secured the release of 100 children kidnapped last month from a Catholic school in the northern state of Niger, in one of the largest single releases of hostages since the mass abduction.
The children, aged 10 to 18, arrived in the capital Abuja by road on Sunday evening and were undergoing medical examinations before being handed over to state officials on Monday, government sources said. They are expected to be reunited with their families shortly afterwards.
Gunmen raided St Mary’s Private Catholic Primary and Secondary School in the remote Papiri community of Niger State’s Agwara district on Nov. 21, abducting 303 students and 12 staff members. Fifty students escaped within days of the attack.
With Sunday’s release, 153 students and the 12 teachers remain in captivity, according to state government and security sources. Authorities declined to say whether ransom was paid or if the release followed military action.
“We are relieved but still anxious because many children and their teachers are still out there,” said a parent who asked not to be named, speaking outside a government building in Minna, the Niger State capital, where families have been gathering for updates.
A spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Kontagora, which runs the school, welcomed the news but said church officials had yet to receive formal notification from the federal government.
The incident is part of a surge in school abductions across northern Nigeria. Days before the St Mary’s attack, armed men seized 25 girls from a state-run secondary school in neighbouring Kebbi State, some 170 km (105 miles) away.
Since the 2014 kidnapping of more than 270 schoolgirls in Chibok by Boko Haram jihadists, more than 1,400 students have been abducted in Nigeria in at least a dozen separate incidents, according to rights groups and local tallies.
Persistent insecurity
Large parts of northwest and north-central Nigeria have become lawless, with criminal gangs known locally as “bandits” carrying out mass abductions for ransom while jihadist groups operate in the northeast.
The latest kidnappings have drawn renewed international attention. U.S. President Donald Trump recently described violence against Christians in Nigeria as “genocide” and threatened possible military intervention and cuts to U.S. aid.
Nigerian officials have rejected the genocide label, saying people of all faiths are victims of the violence.
“There are killings in Nigeria, but they are not restricted to Christians alone. Muslims are being killed, traditional worshippers are being killed,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Kimiebi Imomotimi Ebienfa said last month.
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country with more than 200 million people, is roughly divided between a mostly Muslim north and predominantly Christian south. Muslims account for about 56% of the population and Christians slightly more than 43%, according to widely cited estimates.
As the freed children begin their journey home, pressure is growing on President Bola Tinubu’s administration to curb the wave of abductions that has forced thousands of schools to close and left parents terrified to send children to class.
