94 Students Declared Missing After Boko Haram Attack on Yobe School

A roll call at the Government Girls Secondary School Dapchi, in Yobe State on Tuesday revealed that 94 students were missing after a Monday evening invasion of the school by the dreaded terrorist group, Boko Haram.

Although the police had insisted it had no report of missing persons, a school source told journalists at Dapchi that after the roll call the large number of students could not be accounted for.

The State Commissioner of Education, Alhaji Mohammed Lamin, however, confirmed the incident and said a competent team had been dispatched to the school to investigate the

attack.

He said: “The team is profiling the students to know those who are missing? And, how many of them were able to return or ran to their families at home.”

But the Yobe State Police Command on Tuesday insisted that no case of abducted girls had been reported to it since the attack on the school.

The Commissioner of Police, Mr. Sunmonu Abdulmaliki, said he had, however, begun investigations into the matter.

He said, three men were reportedly abducted by the insurgents in a remote community in Geidam Local Government Area after the attack on the girls’ school.

“We are still collating the details on the attack, census of the girls and the general public,” he said, adding that no casualty was recorded in the attack that involved sporadic gunshots into the air by the insurgents.

The source that spoke to journalists on the attack said he was not able to say categorically if the missing students were abducted by the terrorists or fled as a result of the invasion of their school by the insurgents.

He said: “After the roll call, 610 out of the total number of 704 students have returned. The school was still searching for the remaining 94 students,” adding: “We cannot really say if the students were abducted by the insurgents or fled.”

According to the source: “One thing I can say is that they went into the students’ hostel and many of these students scaled the fence to the bushes. For now we cannot say if they escaped home or have been abducted by the terrorists.”

He said one of the reasons, the school could not yet tell of the whereabouts of the missing students, was because some parents had reported to the school authority that their children had reached their homes safely.

He said the school was currently calling on parents to help the school update its list by reporting cases of their wards reporting home.

The insurgents had, during the attack, carted away food items from the government girls’ college.

It was learnt that the sporadic firing had made many of the student to flee into the bushes around the school.

“What are they doing with it? They are going to take it to refineries; they are going to crack them somewhere. If there are incentives for them to crack them here, they would do so. Ultimately, Nigeria must aim to be the refining corridor for the whole of Africa. That is becoming very critical.

“If we do all that concerning the planned investments in refineries, my position is that the business has got to change. It has got to change to taking your crude oil and been able to refine. It has got to change to be a major player in the power sector. It is got to change from oil, into gas and into clean energy. We have got to look into moving incentives away from oil, back into gas and back into cleaner energy.”