Gunmen kidnap 25 girls from Nigerian boarding school, kill staff member

Gunmen kidnapped 25 girls from a boarding school in Nigeria’s Kebbi state and killed at least one staff member, authorities said Monday.

The schoolgirls were taken away around 4 a.m. and no group immediately claimed responsibility for the incident.

Nafi’u Abubakar Kotarkoshi, police spokesperson told the Associated Press the gunmen had “sophisticated weapons” and exchanged fire with guards before kidnapping the girls.

“A combined team is currently combing suspected escape routes and surrounding forests as part of a coordinated search and rescue operation to recover the abducted students and arrest the perpetrators,” he said, adding that one person was killed and another injured.

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A woman watches as she walks past a classroom at the Shehu Kangiwa Model Primary School in Argungu, Kebbi State, northern Nigeria, April 12, 2025. (Leslie Fauvel / AFP via Getty Images)

Abdulkarim Abdullahi Maga, a resident who said his daughter and granddaughter were kidnapped in the raid, told the AP that the attackers entered the school on motorcycles.

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“They first went straight to the professor and killed him before killing the guard,” Maga said.

These latest kidnappings come amid a series of mass kidnappings in northern Nigeria in recent years.

In 2024, 280 students were kidnapped from a school in Kaduna State and at least 200 others, mostly internally displaced women and children, were kidnapped in Borno State while searching for firewood, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk.

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More than 200 schoolgirls were kidnapped from a Chibok secondary school in 2014 by Boko Haram militants, sparking international outrage and a #BringBackOurGirls campaign.