ABUJA (Reuters) - One hundred and ten girls are missing after an attack on a school in northeast Nigeria by suspected Boko Haram insurgents, the information ministry said on Sunday, in what may be one of the largest abductions since the Chibok kidnappings of 2014.
The
Islamist militant group attained international notoriety after
abducting more than 270 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok. That case
drew global attention to the insurgency and spawned high profile social
media campaign Bring Back Our Girls.
Boko
Haram, whose name translates as “Western education is forbidden” in the
Hausa language widely spoken in northern Nigeria, has killed more than
20,000 people and forced two million to flee their homes in a violent
insurgency that began in 2009.
President
Muhammadu Buhari, the 75-year-old former military ruler elected in 2015
after vowing to crush Boko Haram, has described the disappearance of
the girls after Monday’s attack in the town of Dapchi, Yobe state, as a
“national disaster”.
The
insurgents drove into the town of Dapchi on Monday and attacked the
girls’ school, sending hundreds of students fleeing. Some of the
attackers were camouflaged, with witnesses stating that a number of
students thought they were soldiers.
There
had been confusion over the number of those missing, with estimates
ranging from about 50 to more than 100. State police, Yobe government
and others had given different figures while a parent representing
families of girls who disappeared on Friday told Reuters 105 were
missing.
Yobe
state government added to the confusion when it said on Wednesday that
dozens of the girls had been rescued, only to issue a statement the next
day saying the schoolgirls were mostly still unaccounted for, sparking
anger among locals.
The
Nigerian Air Force on Sunday said the chief of air staff had “directed
the immediate deployment of additional air assets and Nigerian Air Force
personnel to the northeast with the sole mission of conducting day and
night searches for the missing girls”.
“The renewed efforts at locating the girls are being conducted in close liaison with other surface security forces.”
Information
Minister Lai Mohammed, who was part of a delegation of ministers who
met parents and teachers in Dapchi and announced the number of missing
girls, also said police and security officials had been deployed to
schools in the state.
(Additional reporting and writing by Alexis Akwagyiram, Editing by William Maclean)
