At least two girls from a school in northwestern Nigeria where 24 others were abducted on Monday are safe, according to local officials and the principal of the school.
Nigerian security forces have been deployed to rescue the abducted girls. President Bola Tinubu postponed his trip to South Africa for the Group of 20 summit to focus on the kidnapping and other security issues, including an attack on a church in central Nigeria on Tuesday, in West Africa’s most populous nation.
The police initially reported that 25 girls from the school in Maga, Nigeria, in the state of Kebbi, were thought to be missing. They later updated the tally to 24.
One of the girls who avoided the kidnapping described the harrowing scene.
The girl, Khadijat Lawal, 15, said in a phone interview that she, her friends and two sisters first woke up to the sound of people talking outside their dormitory. They became alarmed when they heard someone trying to force the door open.
The person began shooting in the air, she said, and she and her sisters ran to hide in a school toilet.
“When the bandits finally burst in, my two sisters panicked and came out from where we were hiding in the toilet,” Khadijat said. “They were taken away along with the other girls.”
But she stayed in the toilet, hiding until she heard people shouting for their daughters and understood that someone had come looking for them.
“That day is something I will never forget,” she said. “It’s going to remain in my memory for a very long time.”
Her father, Malam Lawal Altine, said he was “worried sick” about Khadijat’s sisters.
The principal of the school, Rabia Musa Magaji, said he hasn’t slept since that night.
“Every time I close my eyes, I see their faces,” he said. “All I want now is for every one of those girls to come back and for no school in this country to live through this again.”
Mr. Magaji said that another girl, Khadija Hassan, 17, was taken from the staff quarters and told to wait at the dormitory entrance while the attackers seized the other girls. But it was dark and she managed to run away, he said.
Khadija’s father, the school’s chief security officer, Malam Hassan Makaku, was killed in the attack. In an interview with local journalists, his wife, Amina Hassan, described the moment the kidnappers broke into their bedroom.
“They cocked their guns to shoot him, but he pleaded with them, saying, ‘Please don’t kill me; let me rise from the bed,’” she said. “As soon as he rose, he started saying, ‘Allahu akbar.’ I was crying, but he asked me not to cry but to recite ‘Allahu akbar’ and we continued reciting it together. They pulled the trigger and shot him.”
The principal said that initial accounts of the kidnapping had mistakenly assumed that the victim was the vice principal on duty at the time.
“It was only after the situation calmed down that we realized he was not the one who had been killed,” Mr. Magaji said.
A state official told Nigerian news media that two other girls who the principal said had been abducted, Hauwa and Salma Liwan, had escaped.
Ismail Alfa contributed reporting.
Ruth Maclean is the West Africa bureau chief for The Times, covering 25 countries including Nigeria, Congo, the countries in the Sahel region as well as Central Africa.
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