Gunmen have abducted dozens of students from a school in Nigeria's northeast, in the latest of a long series of mass kidnappings that have terrorized the region and repeatedly targeted children.
The attack
The assailants stormed the Government Day Secondary School in the town of Lassa, in Borno State, on Monday morning as students were sitting exams, Al Jazeera reported. Three people were killed in the raid, among them a soldier and a teacher, according to officials.
At least 36 students and one member of staff remained in captivity in the days after the attack, a local official said, while eight others who had been seized were rescued, Reuters reported. Those still held are said to include both female and male students. The figures are preliminary and could change as the search continues.
Who is blamed
Officials attributed the attack to the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), a jihadist group that operates across Borno and the wider Lake Chad basin. ISWAP emerged from a split within Boko Haram, the group whose insurgency has ravaged the northeast since 2009, and the two factions have since become rivals. Newsparlor could not independently confirm responsibility for the raid, and no claim had been verified at the time of writing.
A grim pattern
Mass abductions of students have become a recurring feature of Nigeria's security crisis. The best-known case remains the 2014 kidnapping of more than 270 schoolgirls from Chibok, also in Borno, by Boko Haram — an attack that drew global attention under the "Bring Back Our Girls" campaign, and after which some of the girls were held for years.
Since then, both jihadist groups and non-ideological armed gangs — often described as "bandits" — have carried out repeated raids on schools across the north and center of the country, sometimes seizing hundreds of pupils at once for ransom. The Lassa attack is the third such mass school abduction in Nigeria since May, underscoring how persistent the threat remains despite years of military operations.
Pressure on the authorities
The kidnappings have put sustained pressure on Nigeria's government and security forces, which face criticism over their ability to protect schools in remote and insecure areas. After previous abductions, authorities have pledged to bolster school security and to recover those taken, and rights groups have urged faster action to bring captives home.
For now, families in Lassa are waiting for news. Officials said security forces had been deployed to search for the missing, but in a region where captives have sometimes been held for months or years, the coming days will be an anxious test of whether they can be found and freed.
