One of the 25 schoolgirls abducted by terrorists from a boarding school in Kebbi State has escaped from captivity and returned home, the school’s principal confirmed on Tuesday.
The Guardian can authoritatively report that the bandits launched a deadly attack on the Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School, Maga, in Danko-Wasagu Local Government Area, on Monday, November 17. During the invasion, the gunmen killed a staff member and abducted 25 students, taking them into the surrounding forests.
According to the principal, Musa Rabi Magaji, one of the abducted girls managed to slip away from the captors and found her way home late on Monday—just hours after the mass abduction. Her unexpected return has offered a glimmer of hope to anxious families awaiting news of their children.
Magaji also disclosed that another student, who was not among the 25 officially listed as abducted, managed to escape during the chaos of the attack.
She added that security operatives have intensified search-and-rescue missions across the area amid rising concerns over the resurgence of school kidnappings that have continued to plague northwestern Nigeria.
Meanwhile, a top Nigerian general has ordered his troops to fight “day and night” to rescue 25 schoolgirls whose kidnapping in the northwest has been seized on by US President Donald Trump’s followers.
The early Monday morning raid on a secondary school in Kebbi State was the latest abduction of schoolchildren in Muslim-majority northern Nigeria, more than a decade after Boko Haram’s infamous kidnapping of 276 girls in the northeast sparked international uproar.
It has become another flashpoint to draw the ire of the US right following Trump‘s threats of military intervention over the alleged killing of Nigeria’s Christians.
“You must continue day and night fighting. We must find these children,” Major General Waidi Shaibu, recently promoted to chief of army staff, told troops deployed to Kebbi State.
Shaibu urged the soldiers to “leave no stone unturned” in the search for the schoolgirls.
Though police rushed to the Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School in the town of Maga, the gang had managed to scale the fence and abduct the students after killing the school’s vice-principal.
Kebbi is caught between the jihadist threat from neighbouring Niger and criminal gangs who loot villages while kidnapping and killing residents across the north of Africa’s most populous country.
US tensions
Kebbi State police told AFP on Tuesday that the abducted schoolchildren were all Muslim.
But Republican Riley Moore of the US House of Representatives, in a post on X urging his followers to pray for the 25 girls, echoed Trump’s claims of the persecution of Christians.
“While we don’t have all the details on this horrific attack, we know that the attack occurred in a Christian enclave in Northern Nigeria,” Moore wrote.
Trump at the start of November said he had asked the Pentagon to map out a possible plan of attack in Nigeria because radical Islamists are “killing the Christians and killing them in very large numbers”.
Nigeria has rejected that narrative, insisting that the country’s various security crises have left more Muslims dead.
Nigeria is the scene of numerous conflicts, including jihadist insurgencies, which kill both Christians and Muslims, often indiscriminately.
Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar told AFP on Monday that Nigeria was in talks with the United States about security.
Asked whether he thought Washington would send the military to strike, Tuggar said: “No, I do not think so.”
“Because we continue to talk, and as I said, the discussion has progressed. It’s moved on from that.”
