Search continues for hundreds of kidnapped Nigerian schoolchildren

Nigerian security forces continued to search forests and set up roadblocks in the north-west of the country on Sunday in an attempt to find hundreds of kidnapped schoolchildren, but observers said combing the woodland expanses could take weeks.

More than 280 children aged between seven and 18 were taken from a school in Kuriga on Thursday in one of the biggest mass-abductions in recent months in Nigeria’s turbulent north-west. A further 15 children were taken in another raid on a school in Sokoto on Saturday.

The two abductions were the latest in a series of group kidnappings by gunmen, where criminal gangs target schools, colleges and highways as they hunt for large groups of victims to make ransom demands. More than 200 other people, mostly women and children displaced by conflict, were taken in a separate raid in the north-eastern state Borno last week.

No group has claimed responsibility for the school abductions. Militant jihadists waging an insurgency in the north-east were suspected of carrying out the kidnapping in Borno.

Children who had escaped the kidnappers in Kuriga described their ordeal after being taken from their school in a quiet agrarian village about 60 miles outside the north-west city of Kaduna. At about 8am on Thursday, when the school’s 1,000 students were about to settle into their classes, dozens of armed men in military uniforms rode on motorbikes into the school grounds.