President Bola Tinubu has ordered the Minister of State for Defence, Bello Matawalle, to immediately relocate to Kebbi State following the abduction of 24 schoolgirls in the state.
Matawalle, a former governor of Zamfara State, is to remain in Kebbi to coordinate and oversee security operations aimed at securing the release of the kidnapped students.
Armed men had invaded the Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School, Maga, around 4:00 a.m. on Monday, whisking away 24 students.
The minister, expected to arrive in Birnin Kebbi on Friday, is believed to bring significant experience to the assignment, having confronted widespread banditry and mass abductions during his tenure as Zamfara governor from 2019 to 2023.
On February 26, 2021, 279 schoolgirls aged between 10 and 17 were abducted by bandits from Government Girls Science Secondary School, Jangebe, Zamfara State. All victims were released on March 2, 2021.
President Tinubu had earlier postponed his planned visits to Johannesburg, South Africa, and Luanda, Angola, as he awaited security briefings on the Kebbi schoolgirls’ abduction and the Monday attack on worshippers at Christ Apostolic Church, Eruku, in Kwara State.
Gunmen from a criminal gang kidnapped 25 people and killed a staff member in an early morning raid on a northwestern Nigerian girls’ secondary school on Monday, police said.
The latest attack comes more than a decade after nearly 300 girls were abducted from Chibok in the restive northeastern region and sparked international outcry.
Since then, there has been a string of other abductions involving school children.
Police on Monday said the gang, armed with “sophisticated weapons, shooting sporadically, stormed the Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School” in Kebbi state at about 4:00 am (0300 GMT).
Police were deployed but “unfortunately, the suspected bandits had already scaled through the fence of the school and abducted twenty-five students from their hostel to an unknown destination,” police said in a statement.
The school deputy head was shot dead while a security guard was injured during the attack, according to a report prepared for the United Nations.
The military, police tactical units, and local vigilantes have “been deployed in the area and they are currently combing the bandits’ routes and nearby forest” in a bid to rescue the abducted students and arrest the gangs, police said.
Nigeria’s northwest has for years been seeing a rise in heavily armed criminal gangs known as “bandits” who steal cattle, raid villages, kidnap and kill residents, and loot and burn homes.
The northwest has become the region most affected by kidnappings.
