MAIDUGURI — Armed militants suspected to be from the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) have stormed a secondary school in north-eastern Nigeria, killing a teacher and abducting an unknown number of students from their classrooms.
The gunmen raided Government Day Secondary School in the town of Lassa, located in the Askira-Uba local government area of Borno State, at around 09:00 local time on Monday.
Local sources said the attackers opened fire indiscriminately before invading the school’s examination hall, where final-year students were in the middle of sitting their National Examinations Council (NECO) exams.
Market day disguise
The police spokesman for Borno State, Nahum Daso, confirmed the assault, revealing that the insurgents had used the town’s busy local market day as cover to slip into the community undetected.
“It’s Lassa market day, so they took advantage, infiltrated the market on motorcycles and went to the school,” Mr. Daso told reporters. “They shot and killed one teacher and took away all the students who were in their classrooms.”
The spokesman added that local security forces and vigilantes immediately confronted the gunmen as they fled, engaged them in a fierce gun battle, and successfully limited the scale of the mass abduction. A joint security manhunt has been launched in the surrounding forests to rescue the missing students and staff.
Growing parental panic
The raid is the latest in a wave of targeted school abductions that have long terrorised northern Nigeria.
The assault on Lassa comes just 47 days after 42 children were snatched by armed groups from a primary and junior secondary school in the nearby town of Mussa, within the same local government area.
Distraught parents of those children told local media just 24 hours before Monday’s attack that they had still received no contact or ransom demands from the kidnappers, deepening fears over the safety of pupils across the volatile region.
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