The children were still sleeping when gun-toting men on motorcycles arrived at their school
Dakar, Senegal: The children were still asleep when gunmen arrived at the Catholic boarding school on a motorcycle in the early morning hours Friday, witnesses told friends and family members. They fired their weapons into the air and headed straight for the primary school dormitories. The gunmen then loaded dozens of young students, some as young as six, into a large truck and sped away into the darkness.
Many other details about the mass kidnapping at St Mary’s School in Nigeria’s northwestern Niger state are still unknown. These include the identity of the kidnappers and the number of children abducted; estimates range from 50 to 300. Analysts say such incidents are common in this long-unstable region, where criminal gangs operate with impunity by targeting schools and places of worship and holding hostages for ransom.
Attackers kidnapped two dozen girls overnight from a school in neighboring Kebbi province on Monday. The next day, two worshipers were killed during a live-streamed church service in Kwara state.
A man walks past property at St Mary’s Catholic Primary and Secondary School in the Papiri community of Nigeria after gunmen kidnapped children and staff. Credit: Christian Association of Nigeria via AP
The violence comes at a troubling time in U.S. relations with Nigeria, West Africa’s most populous country. U.S. President Donald Trump recently caught Washington and the region off guard by threatening to go to Nigeria “with guns blazing” if the government did not address the persecution of Christians.
On Thursday, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth met with a delegation of Nigerian security leaders at the Pentagon to discuss “ways to make tangible progress in stopping violence against Christians in Nigeria and combating West African jihadist terrorist groups.”
Hegseth “stressed that Nigeria must demonstrate resolve and take both immediate and sustained action to end violence against Christians, and conveyed the Department’s desire to work with, with, and through Nigeria to deter and degrade terrorists who threaten the United States,” Hegseth said.
Riley Moore, the Republican congressman Trump appointed to lead the investigation into the killing of Christians in Nigeria, described the situation at St Mary’s as “heartbreaking” in a post on X on Friday.
“Enough is enough,” he wrote. “We must do everything we can to defend our brothers and sisters in Christ.”
Basuna Magaji, 54, is the uncle of four students at St Mary’s, known as one of the best schools in the area. He said that his 20-year-old nephew and 16-year-old niece managed to escape from their kidnappers, but his brother’s two youngest children – an 11-year-old girl and a 6-year-old boy – were kidnapped.
The dormitories of St Mary’s after the kidnapping. Credit: Christian Association of Nigeria via AP
The older children told Magaji that they managed to escape by running more than three kilometers towards the nearest village as the armed men forced them into the truck at around 3am. “They were crying, they were tired, they had no shoes,” she recounted during a phone interview.
On Friday afternoon, the local government in Agwara said all schools would be closed immediately “to protect the lives and safety of students, teachers and school staff.” Spokesperson Bello Gidi said authorities were still trying to determine how many students were kidnapped.
Magaji said his brother and other families were camped out at the school, waiting for answers.
increasing violence
Nigeria’s population of 230 million is roughly divided between Christians and Muslims. While Trump officials focus on the dangers facing Christians, experts say Muslim communities are also frequently victimized and most attacks are not religiously motivated.
Insecurity is widespread across the country. Islamist insurgencies are in full swing in the northeast, farmer-herder clashes are common in central Nigeria, and the northwest, where two school kidnappings took place, is affected by increasingly violent banditry.
Experts said bandits were likely responsible for the kidnapping in St Mary’s, but Islamist militant groups have made recent gains in the area. Sometimes, they said, criminals sold hostages to militants, who returned them to their families in exchange for ransom.
“When it comes to the relationship between bandits and Islamists, there is competition and cooperation, and it could be a mix of both,” said Confidence McHarry, a senior analyst at SBM Intelligence, a Lagos-based consultancy. “Financial incentive is very strong”
According to the SBM report, 4,722 people were kidnapped in nearly 1,000 separate incidents across Nigeria between July 2024 and June. The report stated that the kidnappers received a ransom payment of US$1.7 million ($2.6 million).
The money is often paid by a mix of federal and local governments as well as relatives, McHarry said. The vast majority of school kidnappings occur in non-religious government institutions. He said this made the St Mary kidnapping particularly “high-profile” and “will certainly lead to greater attention and greater pressure on the Nigerian state”.
A spokesman for Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu did not respond to requests for comment. Tinubu had postponed his international travel plans this week following the earlier kidnapping incident in Kebbi state.
“I fear we are in a new cycle,” said James Barnett, a Nigeria expert who lives between Lagos and the United Kingdom, noting that mass kidnappings “tend to come in bursts.” He said these were quite common in 2021, when there was a “copycat effect.”
A man in Lagos reads a local newspaper with headlines about kidnappings.Credit: access point
Barnett added that bandits often look for soft targets driven by opportunism rather than ideology. He stated that the 24 girls kidnapped on Monday were from Muslim families, while those kidnapped on Friday were from a Catholic school.
Center for Democracy and Development research analyst Dengiyefa Angalapu said some Christian communities were targeted. He said there are now armed guards in front of many large churches.
Angalapu said Nigeria could use U.S. aid to resolve its security crisis, but any aid should be “strategic rather than tactical.” “Our country is very divided,” he continued. “There is no guarantee that things will not escalate” in the event of a harsh American intervention.
A missionary in Agwara, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation, said he personally knew three children who were abducted from St Mary’s.
The missionary said there was now “a lot of crying and praying” in the villages. “Everyone calls us and asks for prayers.”
Washington Post
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