Hundreds of parents whose children were abducted last week at a Catholic school in north-central Niger gathered at the school site on Friday to plead with the government for their children's rescue.
More than 250 children remain captive after gunmen stormed the school early on 21 November and took more than 300 students and staff. School authorities said 50 children managed to escape.
“The children they took, some of them are still of tender age,” Abuchi Nwolisa, a parent at the school, told the Associated Press. “They took some of them from their sleeping bed.”
Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu declared a state of emergency earlier this week, bolstering the country’s police force to combat escalating attacks. The country has been rocked by two separate mass abductions of schoolchildren in the past two weeks. Gunmen also attacked a school in Kebbi, abducting 30 students before the government secured their release.
Mass abductions of schoolchildren have become common in Nigeria, which faces critical threats from several armed groups, including those specialising in kidnappings for ransom. Since 2014, there have been at least a dozen mass abductions of school students, and at least 1,799 students have been kidnapped, according to an AP tally. Some are never rescued.
“We have parents who have two, three, five children with the abductors, and that is why we are here to tell the world that this is real,” Stephen Okafor, spokesperson for the Minna Catholic Mission, told the AP.
