Nigeria confirms 110 girls missing after Boko Haram school attack
ABUJA — The Nigerian government has confirmed that 110 girls were missing after a Boko Haram school attack in the northeast, following days of silence on the children’s fate.
“The Federal Government has confirmed that 110 students of the Government Science and Technical College in Dapchi, Yobe State, are so far unaccounted for, after insurgents believed to be from a faction of Boko Haram invaded their school on Monday”, the Information Ministry said in a statement on Sunday.
The statement came after authorities were unable to account for 110 of the school’s 906 students, the ministry said.
The kidnapping has raised questions about the military’s repeated claims that the extremists are on the verge of defeat, after nearly nine years of bitter fighting.
It has also revived memories of the 2014 mass abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls from Chibok that shook the world.
On Feb 19, terrified pupils fled the boarding school at night when heavily armed fighters in military fatigues and turbans stormed the town, shouting “Allahu Akbar (God is greatest)”.
The authorities initially denied that any student had been kidnapped.
On Friday, President Muhammadu Buhari apologized to the girls’ families, saying: “This is a national disaster. We are sorry that this could have happened.”
Many fear the girls were abducted as brides for Boko Haram extremists. The group kidnapped 276 girls from a boarding school in Chibok in 2014 and forced them to marry their captors.
About 100 of the Chibok girls have never returned to their families in nearly four years.
The Nigerian military on Sunday said it had deployed air assets, including intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms, in search of the missing schoolgirls.
Air force spokesman Olatokunbo Adesanya said air operations in search of the girls are being conducted day and night.
Targeting education
Buhari was elected in 2015 on a promise to defeat Boko Haram, after the extremists grew in strength under his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan.
Jonathan was lambasted for his tardy response to the Chibok abduction, which saw 276 girls from the town in Borno state taken in the dead of night.
In his first expanded comments on Dapchi, Buhari said: “This is a national disaster. We are sorry that this could have happened.”
The kidnapping is the worst jihadist assault to have hit Nigeria since Buhari came to power.
Schools, particularly those with a secular curriculum, have been targeted by Boko Haram, whose name roughly translates from Hausa as “Western education is forbidden”.
Boko Haram’s quest to establish a hardline Islamic state in northeast Nigeria has left at least 20,000 dead and made more than 2.6 million others homeless since 2009.
The extremists have increasingly turned to kidnapping for ransom as a way to finance their operations and win back key commanders in prisoner swaps with the Nigerian government.