Students Missing After AK-47 Group Attack On Nigerian Schools

Photo illustration (Jay Rembert / Unsplash)

JAKARTA - Friday, December 11, 2020, an attack took place at a school in Nigeria. The attack by people armed with AK-47s resulted in many missing people until now.

Citing CNN, Monday, December 14, Hassan Abdul-Bashir is one of the victims of the attack. The 13-year-old was ordered out, where armed men herded everyone to the school gates.

That's when he decided to run. Abdul-Bashir took cover under a damaged school bus, then ran to the school fence and went into hiding.

He managed to escape. But an unknown number of students from the Kankara Government Science Middle School, including Abdul-Bashir's cousin and friend, are still missing.

"They commanded the crowd like a shepherd tending sheep," said Abdul-Bashir.

He said the gunmen demanded money from students, searched their lockers and took some of their belongings. "They shot the police guarding our school. I saw them herding students a lot. There could be as many as 200 students, but I'm not sure, "he said.

Another student, Musa Adamu, also said that he and many of his classmates managed to escape by jumping out of the window. They jumped when they heard gunshots.

"We went to the fence and climbed it and jumped down," said Adamu.

"The gunshot was getting louder, we were running in different directions, into the forest. Most of us were not wearing shoes, and we kept running until we were tired and the gunshot was faint," he added.

Adamu said he spent the night in the forest with about 20 other students. It wasn't until the next morning that they realized that his leg was injured from making the run. They walk back to town, meeting other students hiding in the forest on their way.

"When we got to school, we saw soldiers, and they asked us to come in and write our names, after a while they told us to go pack up and go home," he said.

Local police said that a large number of attackers on motorbikes ambushed the boy's secondary school in an attempted kidnapping. The perpetrators wanted to get a ransom.

Police spokeswoman Katsina Isa Gambo said in a statement that reinforcements who arrived at the scene "forced the criminals to retreat back into the forest." Gambo said 200 students had made it back safely to school.

But he also stressed it was "too early" to know how many students went missing or if some were kidnapped. The state's education commissioner, Lawal Badmasi, said some of the students were believed to be still with the kidnappers.

It is unclear how many people were in school at the time of the attack as some may have returned home after exams. Soldiers visit student families' homes to find out who is still missing or may have been kidnapped.

Badmasi said similar public high schools in the state usually have around 700 students. However, two students from the school estimated that more than 1,200 are currently attending school, taking into account the absence of senior students from the school, who left school after completing year-end exams.

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari condemned the attack and ordered soldiers and police to pursue the attackers and ensure that no students were injured or missing. According to a report sent to the President by local Governor Aminu Bello Masari and the army, the military exchanged gunfire with gunmen during an ongoing operation in the Zango forest in Kankara on Saturday 12 December. At that time, there were no reports of casualties.

"The police, Nigerian Army and Nigerian Air Force are working with school authorities to ascertain the true number of students who have disappeared and / or been kidnapped while search parties are working diligently to find and / or rescue the missing students," Gambo said in a statement. He added that extra security had been given to the school.