Nigeria says 130 kidnapped Catholic schoolchildren freed

According to a presidential spokesman, Nigerian authorities obtained the release of 130 kidnapped schoolchildren after 100 were freed earlier this month from a Catholic school.

In a post on X on Sunday, Sunday Dare wrote, “Another 130 Abducted Niger State Pupils Released, None Left In Captivity.”

In the north-central Niger State, hundreds of students and staff members were abducted in late November from St. Mary’s co-educative boarding school.

The attack occurred in the town of Chibok, where there have been numerous recent mass kidnappings that are comparable to those committed by Boko Haram in 2014.

The West African nation is plagued by armed bandits in the northwest and armed “bandit” gangs in the northeast, all of which are interconnected security issues.

Throughout the ordeal, it has been unclear how many children were actually taken from St. Mary’s.

After the attack in the rural hamlet of Papiri, the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) initially claimed that 315 students and staff members had been unaccounted for.

About 100 people were freed on December 7 after about 50 of them escaped immediately after that.

Before Sunday’s announcement that 130 people had been rescued, roughly 165 people were thought to be still in captivity.

However, a UN official claimed that all those arrested appeared to have been released because numerous suspected kidnappers had managed to flee during the attack and make their way home, according to a UN source.

The source said that the accounting process has been challenging because the children’s homes are dispersed across rural Nigeria and that sometimes it takes three or four hours to travel by motorbike to their remote villages.

The source informed AFP that “the remaining number of girls and secondary school students will be transported to Minna, the Niger State capital, on Monday.”

According to Daniel Atori, a CAN spokesman in Niger State, “we’ll still need to do final verification.”

Mass kidnappings

Who was the kidnapped from their boarding school and how was their release made public has not been revealed.

In Nigeria, criminals and armed groups frequently engage in quick cash kidnappings for ransom.

However, the country’s already gloomy security situation was unaffordably raised by a string of mass abductions in November.

A bride and her bridesmaids were also taken hostage by the attackers, who also took the hostages of 38 churchgoers and two dozen Muslim schoolgirls.

The kidnappings come as Nigeria is facing a diplomatic slog from the United States, where President Donald Trump threatened military intervention after making allegations that there have been numerous, mass-murders of Christians in the country that amount to a “genocide.”

The Christian right has long used that framing in the US and Europe, but Nigeria’s government and independent analysts disagree.

The Boko Haram armed group seized nearly 300 girls from their boarding school in the northeastern town of Chibok in one of the first mass kidnappings that attracted international attention in 2014.