More than a week after gunmen took scores of youngsters from St. Mary’s Catholic Primary and Secondary Schools in Papiri, Niger State, 265 teachers and kids are still missing.
Bulus Yohanna, the Catholic Bishop of Kontagora, said this today during an interview on Channels Television.
Bishop Yohanna claimed that the numbers include 12 teachers and 253 kids. He also said that the diocese has sent the names of the captives to Umar Bago, the governor of Niger State.
“We couldn’t find 303 students and 12 teachers. “We added that number to make it 315 that can’t be found after the headcount,” the cleric claimed.
“Those who got away went back to their communities. We had 50 calls from people who had found their parents, but we couldn’t find 315 of them, including workers and teachers. So we took that amount away and now we have 265 missing.
Bishop Yohanna states that St. Mary’s School never got any notice about an attack that was going to happen, and he argues that there was no reason for the school to have gotten such “instruction and not obey it.”
Yohanna, who is also the head of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) in Niger State, appealed the federal government to send security personnel to protect schools in the North Central state.
He said that the school never acquired any information before the kidnapping, even though many said they did.
The Catholic priest indicated that the parents of the kidnapped schoolgirls are worried about the kidnapping.
He said that two parents have perished from the shock of what happened.
The cleric asked the federal and state governments to help the school by getting the gunmen to release the pupils and teachers they are still holding.
The gunmen took more than 300 kids from the Catholic-run school, which is a sign of the return of mass kidnappings that have been a problem in Nigeria for a long time.
That same week, 25 schoolgirls were taken from another school, while 38 worshippers were snatched from a church in Kebbi and Kwara States. This made President Bola Tinubu declare security a national emergency.
The attack in Niger is the most recent in a string of kidnappings of schoolchildren.
At least 50 kids and staff from the Catholic school St. Mary’s were able to get out, but many more are still being held. Some of the kids who were taken are old enough to go to preschool.
President Bola Tinubu has launched a manhunt for the people who did this. He has promised to make sure that the missing students and other people who are currently being held captive in the country are found.
Opposition leaders have said that the Nigerian government has not done enough to protect its citizens, and some have even called on Tinubu to step down after the horrific attacks in Africa’s most populous country.
In Nigeria, there have been several mass kidnappings, primarily by criminal gangs that want to acquire money for their victims and target weak groups of people in rural areas where there isn’t much police presence.
A lot of the people who are held captive are freed or rescued within weeks or months, and some of them get away on their own.
The first well-known mass kidnapping was in 2014, when Boko Haram terrorists took 276 girls from their dorms in the northeast of the country.
About 90 of the girls are still missing more than ten years later. Nigeria is always in a security crisis because “bandit” gangs raid villages, kill people, and abduct individuals for money.
Earlier this month, US President Donald Trump said he might use military force against what he called the targeted murdering of Christians. The federal government has denied this accusation.
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