ABUJA, Nigeria – Days before armed men broke into a high school in northwestern Nigeria’s Zamfara state and kidnapped hundreds of girls, school officials and local security agencies were warned that there was danger in the city, especially in the area where school is located, according to local residents.
On Friday, heavily armed militants arrested at least 315 girls who were at the Government Women’s High School in the city of Jangebe. The militants arrived on motorcycles at around 1:30 am local time and drove the kidnapped girls into the nearby forest, leaving the victims’ relatives upset and anxious. Residents said “strange men” patrolled the school area and intimidated members of the local community in the vicinity of the school days before the kidnappings took place.
“Suddenly, we saw strange men on the street [leading to the Government Girls’ Secondary School] at night acting as if there are security guards, ”Danlami Umar, who lives near the school, told The Daily Beast. “They were stopping passersby and asking them where they were going.”
The men occupied the neighborhood around the school for two days before the incident, harassing pedestrians and causing residents to alert the police about their activities.
“As soon as we denounced them, they disappeared from the area,” said Umar. “We then told the police to reinforce security in the school area, but that was not done.”
But people living near the school were not the only ones to express concern about the security situation in the area. Some family members, the Daily Beast found, asked school officials to close the board and allow girls to attend classes as daytime students because of the growing reports of criminal activity in the surrounding areas. His pleas fell on deaf ears.
“People complained that their homes were being raided at night by gunmen and that their children were constantly harassed by these thugs, so some parents asked the school to close the pension if these criminals decided to visit the school one day,” Jibril Abubakar, whose niece attends school, but is not among the missing, she told The Daily Beast.
“Unfortunately, someone at the school said that the authorities could not close the dormitories on their own, claiming that they needed to obtain approval from the state Ministry of Education before doing so,” added Abubakar.
Concerns about their children’s safety have forced some parents to prevent their children from returning to their dormitories, rather than having them attend school as students during the day, according to Abubakar. The move may have saved more girls from being kidnapped on Friday.
“Some parents predicted this and did what was right, keeping their daughters away from the pension,” said Abubakar. “If not, we would have more than 500 school girls missing today.”
No group has yet claimed responsibility for Friday’s kidnappings, which took place more than a week after 42 people, including 27 students, were kidnapped in a similar attack to a government school in the north-central state of Niger. The boys have not yet been recovered.
Almost 24 hours after the Jangebe girls were apprehended, a joint operation involving the police and the army was unable to identify their location. “There is information that they have been transferred to a neighboring forest and we are tracking and taking care,” said Abutu Yaro, police commissioner for the state of Zamfara, at a news conference on Friday night.
The growing insecurity in parts of northwest and central north Nigeria, especially after hundreds of students were kidnapped in Katsina state last December, has forced state governments in two regions to close boarding schools in vulnerable areas. The Zamfara government waited until Friday’s kidnappings before taking similar measures. But for many in the turbulent city of Jangebe, the change came too late.
“If they had acted at the right time, the girls would be with their families and no one would beg the military to find their daughters,” said Abubakar. “This indifferent attitude by the government must stop.”