Nigeria says 130 kidnapped Catholic schoolchildren freed

The country has seen a wave of recent mass abductions, as it suffers from multiple interlinked security concerns.

Nigerian authorities have secured the release of 130 kidnapped schoolchildren taken by gunmen from a Catholic school in November, according to a presidential spokesman, after 100 were freed earlier this month.

“Another 130 Abducted Niger State Pupils Released, None Left In Captivity,” Sunday Dare said in a post on X on Sunday.

In late November, hundreds of students and staff were kidnapped from St Mary’s co-educational boarding school in north-central Niger State.

The attack came amid a wave of mass abductions reminiscent of the 2014 Boko Haram kidnapping of schoolgirls in the town of Chibok.

The West African country suffers from multiple interlinked security concerns, from armed groups in the northeast to armed “bandit” gangs in the northwest.

The exact number of children taken from St Mary’s has been unclear throughout the ordeal.

Initially, the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) said that 315 students and staff were unaccounted for after the attack in the rural hamlet of Papiri.

About 50 of them escaped immediately afterwards, and on December 7, the government secured the release of about 100 people.

That would leave about 165 thought to be still in captivity before Sunday’s announcement that 130 were rescued.

However, a UN source told the AFP news agency that all those taken appeared to have been released, as dozens thought to have been kidnapped had managed to run off during the attack and make their way home.

The accounting has been complicated because the children’s homes are scattered across swaths of rural Nigeria, sometimes requiring three or four hours of travel by motorbike to reach their remote villages, the source said.

The source told the AFP that “the remaining set of girls/secondary school students will be taken to Minna”, the capital of Niger State, on Monday.

“We’ll have to still do final verification,” Daniel Atori, a spokesman for CAN in Niger State, told the AFP.

Mass kidnappings

It has not been made public who seized the children from their boarding school, or how the government secured their release.

Kidnappings for ransom are a common way for criminals and armed groups to make quick cash in Nigeria.

But a spate of mass abductions in November put an uncomfortable spotlight on the country’s already grim security situation.

Assailants kidnapped two dozen Muslim schoolgirls, 38 church worshippers, and a bride and her bridesmaids, with farmers, women and children also taken hostage.

The kidnappings also come as Nigeria faces a diplomatic offensive from the United States, where President Donald Trump has alleged that there have been mass killings of Christians in Nigeria that amounted to a “genocide”, and he threatened military intervention.

Nigeria’s government and independent analysts reject that framing, which has long been used by the Christian right in the US and Europe.

One of the first mass kidnappings that drew international attention was in 2014, when nearly 300 girls were seized from their boarding school in the northeastern town of Chibok by the Boko Haram armed group.

A decade later, Nigeria’s kidnap-for-ransom crisis has “consolidated into a structured, profit-seeking industry” that raised some $1.66m between July 2024 and June 2025, according to a recent report by SBM Intelligence, a Lagos-based consultancy.